Gallery Wall! (Finally...)

I know it has been eons since I last brought up putting together a gallery wall in my living room, but I promise I sorta have an excuse for not actually putting it up until the other day.

I'm not sure if I brought it up at all, but the Navy recently had a large number of lay-offs (yeah, I never thought the military did lay-offs either); it was technically called the Enlisted Retention Board (or the ERB).  This isn't the first or the last time they've done this, but it usually isn't done on this scale.  The Sailor's rate (which is basically military terms for his position) got cut by 25%.  So literally, 1 in 4 people who do what The Sailor does recently were told as of next spring or fall they will no longer be part of the Navy.  Some rates were cut by as much as 70%.

Well, needless to say, if we were going to be kicked out of the Navy at some point next year I had no desire to be hanging pictures throughout the house.  But, thankfully, we found out a few weeks ago that The Sailor is not being cut!

So anyway, back to my gallery wall.  I've had the stuff I wanted to hang up for quite a while now, it was really just a matter of laying it out and hanging it up.  So, the first step was figuring out how I was going to arrange all the frames, which I did on the floor in front of the wall they would eventually be hung up on (Gabby was helping me):

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The next step is actually super clever and unfortunately I can't take the credit for coming up with it, haha.  Basically any blog that I read who has posted about gallery walls brought up using magazine pages to layout how you want to hang the frames up before you actually hang the pieces and all of them attribute the idea to the blog Young House Love.  But yeah, so first I taped together pieces of an old Ok! magazine so they would reflect how big the frames are:

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Then I taped them up on the wall.  Because I was just picking them up off the ground and placing them directly on the wall, it ended up being a mirror image of what I had on the ground, but luckily it didn't really matter:

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Fun fact - I got lazy after hanging the magazine pages up and ended up leaving it like that for like two days, haha, so classy...

I had also marked on the magazines where the hanging part of the frame was so I just put up the hangers right over the magazine cut outs.  Obviously for any frame that had multiple hanging points I had to use a level to have the the magazine hung up precisely how I wanted the frame to hang; any frame that just had one hanging point was a lot easier.

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And then I pulled down the magazines, and the hangers were in the perfect spot!

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The wing emblem is actually super deceiving.  It looks like it's made out of metal when in reality it's made out of plastic.  And The Sailor had drilled a hole in one side of it (I have no idea how he had it hanging before) so I got to use my drill to make a hole in the other side so I could eventually nail that sucker up on the wall.  But I actually did that last.  And since I only had little gold nails, after hanging it I used a Sharpie to make the nail heads black, haha.  It worked really well though!

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Personal Photo

The frames that are in the bottom right and all the way to the left don't actually have pictures in them yet.  The one on the left will eventually have a picture of each of the pets in it and the frame on the bottom right will eventually have random pictures of The Sailor and I (and probably the baby) in it.  Here are some close-ups of what I hung up.

On the right side we have a cartoon picture of a type of jet that The Sailor used to work on that is actually signed by the artist, his Air Warfare wing emblem, a quote about Love ("There is only one happiness in life - to love and be loved" - George Sand), a decorative quote/general words of wisdom about Life, and a random frame:

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 And in the middle we have a drawing of a bridge that The Sailor actually drew (he's so talented), a quote about Life ("Life is not measured by the breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away"), and The Sailor's "Shellback" certificate.  You become a "shellback" when you're in the Navy when you cross the equator for the first time on deployment. There's a ceremony - which I think is just a politically correct way of saying they haze the younger sailors.  Either way, the certificate is really pretty!

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I love how the whole thing turned out.  And I love that the walls in my living room aren't bare anymore.

Do you have any plans to create a "gallery wall" in your home?  Or do you already have one (and if you already have one, did you use the magazine trick)?

Until next time...

PS - I just had to share this...Every night Gabby, Lola, and Tom all try to snuggle with me on the couch, and last night I just happened to catch a picture of it.  Yes, I am under that grey blanket, lol, and Gabby is snuggling with my foot:

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