Photo Wall

We’ve had a few different versions of photo collage walls in our homes over the years and it’s actually the project in my house about which people first starting telling me “you should have a blog,” so I thought I’d share a how to.

While I was away with the Cuties a few months ago, one of the frames on our staircase collage fell off the wall in the middle of the night and woke Cute Husband with a start.  Thinking on his feet like only a husband can at 3:00 a.m., he immediately sensed impending danger and took down all of the rest of the frames.

Yeah, that’s pretty much my reaction, too.  So it took me a little time to regroup, but I decided to turn lemons into lemonade and see the good in having to start fresh {OK, those of you who know me in real life can stop laughing now, since you know that’s totally not how it went down.  I pouted.  I procrastinated.  And then I sighed dramatically until I finally got off my tush and got to work}.  I did make the decision to add a second wall where our staircase turns, to update the pictures, and to make some repairs to the older picture frames in case by some teeny tiny chance Cute Husband was right about the torn old frame backs and there was a chance they might fall down in the near future.

So here’s how you make a photo collage wall.  First, figure out your design plan.  You can do color, black & white, or a combination of the two.  Your picture frames can be all different, the same, metals, woods, etc.  The possibilities are endless, but here’s my advice: pick some sort of unifying theme to help tie it together in a cohesive manner.  For us, I chose black & white photos and black frames.  But I’m cheap thrifty and I cheated a little.  I scoured the house for any frame I could hang on the wall and dug through the depths of the attic, in addition to the clearance shelves at TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Home Goods, Walmart and anywhere else I happened upon.  ANY frame would do and I simply hit it with a few coats of black spray paint, and voila ~ we were uniform.

After you frame your pictures, you next lay them out on brown kraft paper, trace them, and cut them out.  I like to write some sort of notation as to what picture is in that frame so I can mix up my photos well.  Our wall spans six generations of family photos so I wanted to ensure that the old pictures and the new ones were intermingled and that we didn’t end up with a blob of six photos in a row of just Big Cutie.  Once you’ve cut out all your paper templates, grab some blue painter’s tape and start playing around with your layout until you have all the pictures where you want them and spaced how you want them {I’m sure I’ll be asked if the different colored templates mean anything.  They mean absolutely nothing.  I ran out of kraft paper close to the end and was way too lazy to go buy another roll so I was using anything I could get my hands on.}

After this, I flipped each frame over and measured down to see how far my nail should go.  I literally wrote this measurement right on the paper on the wall and then took my ruler and found the midpoint across to see where those two measurements met.  By drawing right on the paper template I could easily take my nail and picture hook and hammer right in the perfect spot.  Once the picture hook was in the wall, just rip the paper off and throw it out.  Can you guess where I was still waiting on one last enlargement to arrive from Shutterfly when this picture was taken? 🙂

If your project is in a high traffic zone like mine, I recommend using small felt adhesive circles on the back corners of your frames.  It will help the frames “hug” the walls and not move around.  You can find them at Target or Walmart and they’re very inexpensive.

So there you go.  This is the “long” way to make a photo collage wall.  I’ve done it the “eyeball” method and gotten fairly good results, but honestly, this really makes a difference, I promise.  And if you have plaster walls like I do, there’s no way I’d try it any other way.   There’s nothing like being surrounded by photographs of people you love.  I’d love to see your collage walls if you want to share!

Now, here’s where I confess how much I want to move that switchplate and alarm panel over about four inches because they make me crazy that I couldn’t work them into the collage a little better.  I never said I didn’t have issues.

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