Have you ever seen a 16 x 20 blown-up image of just your face? I’m not talking about a mirror reflection in a bathroom. I’m talking about your entire face. In print. Hung on a wall. Magnified. 

Horrified yet? I know we were lol 

Kary came up with a great idea of having an almost floor to ceiling gallery wall in our kitchen right off of our main entertaining area. (Once we actually HAVE people over…but that’s a separate blog post in itself.. Back to the gallery wall) 

Statement piece for sure, but one that had to be done “just right” so we could draw just enough attention to the wall, without it being “overdone”. I think we pulled it off, even with our big ole heads. 

With this project we knew the look we wanted to go for, but also wanted to do it in a more cost effective way, since there’s definitely a pre-done for you $1,200 version of this look by Framebridge, but that wasn’t exactly in our budget for this one. 

Kary being the resourceful woman that she is, took matters into her own hands. 

1. She had me take photos of the wall as it was, and then she photoshopped our entire gallery wall top to bottom, complete with lights, photos and everything. I was impressed for sure. 

2. She decided that we would use photos from our amazing wedding since we finally had a place to show them off. 

3. She then sourced and found similarly sized frames from Ikea, and decided to spray paint them to get that gold look we wanted. 

4. Ordered photos to be printed and delivered from Target. 

5. Purchased sconces and lights from Amazon. 

Once we got all the pieces prepped and ready, the installation began. 

Having never installed a gallery wall, I did a bunch of research to see what others said was the easiest way to get started. I read about a lot of shortcut ways to make it super simple….

- Measure and put tape where all the holes will go, so you have a roadmap for hanging

- Line up your photos on the ground how you want them, use one long piece of tape across the back and mark where the holes need to be, and then put the big piece of tape on the wall, and voila! 

- Start from the middle, and work from there…

- On and on and on....

Let’s just say it was NOT as easy as they said. I tried some variation of all of the steps above and none of them worked for me. It wasn’t until much later that I figured out why….Unless the backs of the frames were re-assembled the exact same way on all pictures, the measurements will be off… 

So needless to say this was a labor of love 🙂 But what made it easier was seeing Kary’s face from the happiest day of our lives, consistency along the way (in real life she was upstairs attempting to get some sleep while I finished this into the wee hours of the morning) 

But the final product was breathtaking and really completed our space. I couldn’t have been more happier with it. 

And honestly, seeing my face that large, really wasn’t all that bad after all!