Living Room: Collage Wall {Settled In September}

I love having pictures throughout my house. Most of the time, the things in my house at least have a practical purpose even if they happen to be cute. I want to live in my house. I don’t like the idea of being uncomfortable, especially in my home. I mean seriously, if you know me well, you know that I don’t own “real clothes”. I wear t-shirts and comfy shorts, pants or jeans, and flip-flops.

So when it comes to my home , I’m fairly practical…and cheap. Hehehe We try very hard to get the same age pictures of each of our children. Or at least close to. We did 3 and 6 {and possibly 9} months and then every year. With 3 children and one on the way, that’s a lot of pictures. We also tried to do a family picture once a year. We’re totally slacking on all of these. We haven’t had professional pictures taken in a year and half. Ya know, all this church planting and commuting business had us a little distracted from our photo sessions. We have MORE than enough snap shots in this time. My Facebook page is packed full of daily moments captured.

All this to say, in our old house, we had a huge hallway upstairs that you could see downstairs through the balcony opening thingy. I had tons of space to sprawl out the kiddos. In our new home, there’s not that perfect hallway for the “family portrait wall”. We do however have giant blank walls in our living room. A while back, I ask you guys on the as Jules is going Facebook page “How many pictures of your kids was too many in a public room?” Most of you said there’s never too many. I went with it!

It took me forever to decide how to display these piles of frames on my big wall. I was scared to make a catastrophe of awkward groups, one kid bunched together in a pile, too many of the same color near one another, and so on.

Finally, I just laid them out on the floor and played with them for an entire day. Staring at them, moving, adding and taking away other decorative items to break up the frames. THIS is what I finally came up with. Its a work in progress and still missing some pieces but this is at least a start & frames are laying around in piles 😀
To make sure I had them in the same placement as on the floor, I used THIS technique from Pinterest.

• I flipped all the frames over so I could see the hooks they needed to be hanging from. I then used a long piece of wax paper to mark where that row of nails needed to be placed with a colored sharpy. {Sadly, I went through all kinds of other materials to mark the holes on but I couldn’t come up with anything else transparent and lightweight.}
  
• After marking that row of hooks, I taped the wax paper to the wall at the height I wanted and made sure it was level. I started with the top row and worked my way down from the tallest row. I wanted to make sure they started near “Big Betsy” and weren’t crazy high on the wall so I measuring how high I wanted the bottom row off of "Big Betsy" and the mantel {to come} and then added the height for the next 2 rows.
  
• I repeated this process with each row but using a different color marker for each row…because I’m cheap and didn’t want to use an entire roll of wax paper. Don’t forget to measure the distance from the the top nails to one on the next row to make sure they are spaced appropriately when you start putting up the next row of nails. Use a level both for hanging the wax paper with nail placements as well as after hanging each frame.
  

Here is the after pictures minus the mantel we were still working on as well as the fabric, quote, and picture for the frame where the glass broke in the move.
Hope you enjoyed day one of Settled In September. Come back the rest of this week to tour the rest of the living room. Over this month we’ll walk through the entire house.

EEeeekk. I’m excited to show you guys around!