Hallway Frame Gallery

So I previously showed off our much-improved-by-a-coat-of-paint hallway: (**Update: I did eventually replace that burned-out bulb…. and of course a week later another burned out)

And also hinted that I went out to create a “gallery wall” of frames. I gathered up all of the random frames I had laying around the house, as well as anything else I thought I could hang up on the wall (including an old vanity Euro-license plate), and voila:

It’s not quite finished yet, but I like where it’s going….

First and foremost, I had to get a mirror up there, because it’s the only full-length mirror in the house. I’m taking the photo from the bedroom, so you can see how it’s actually a useful spot – it helps me check out my outfits before I leave the house looking ridiculous … or more ridiculous than I intend, at least (see my awesomely and obnoxiously bright outfit in this post). But since the mirror was your typical $5 or $10 college-style, back-of-the-door mirror, I wanted to make it feel a little higher quality. So I added some twine (twisting a few strings together, to make it thicker, then staple-gunned it to the frame of the mirror), and hung it from a colorful doorknob that I had lying around (probably from Hobby Lobby or something similar).

The large canvas is one of our wedding photos, printed on (duh) canvas. I like canvas prints, but can never stomach the cost of them. But I happened to check out My Pix 2 Canvas on a day that they were having a “buy a 16″x20″ canvas for $25!” promotion, so I jumped on that. I probably couldn’t buy a plain 16″x20″ canvas for that much, let alone have one printed, so it was an awesome deal. (Note: this isn’t the first time I’ve used their site to order a photo canvas, and I’ve had great experiences each time — I actually got another wedding-photo canvas at the same time as this one).

The awesome license plate is something that Alex picked up on a bachelor party weekend. I used to drive a SmartCar (awesomeness), and while at a car show Alex saw this “Ur Mom” plate and thought it would be extra hilarious on such a tiny little car.

It was. Extra hilarious.

We’ve since retired Truman the Smart Car, but his memory lives on in the license plate on the wall.

I don’t want to zoom in on the people-photographs (since this is, after all, the internet, and the subjects might not all agree to be shown), but here are a few other highlights (they are cell-phone pictures, so I’m sorry for the mediocre quality):

I’m a big photograph person — as in, I like to look at them (I’m not really good at taking them). So I have found that when it comes to frames, I tend to fill them with photos, photos, and more photos. It is only recently that I’ve branched out into the realm of putting things-that-aren’t-photographs (but are still nice to look at) on my wall.

Clockwise from the top left:

1. An awesome print from VOL25’s Etsy shop, customized with our initials.
2. A robot-themed birthday card from my fabulous sister. I love me some robots, and I think he looks extra cool in this floating-glass style frame (is that a real description?). He looks like he’s got his own little house up there on the wall.
3. A photo-turned-postcard from my professional photographer friend, Kristin Thompson. I believe this was a shot from her trip to Bali!
4. A shiny piece of scrapbook paper (shiny!)
5. My “let’s just see how this works” attempt at DIY photo boards. I’d seen a lot of Mod Podge-d faux canvases and boards on Pinterest, etc, and wanted to figure out how they actually looked. So I took some scrap wood & printed a picture of my dogs on regular paper. Other than messing around with the glue for too long (I kept painting over the same area, even when it was partially drying, so I ended up getting a lot of color smearing & bleeding), it turned out looking better than I thought. Having never used Mod Podge before, I must say I was pleasantly surprised / impressed by the finish (my horrible handiwork notwithstanding). If/when I try it again, I’ll put a little more effort into it.

I will definitely be adding more as I go along, and filling in some spaces with smaller things. But for now I think it looks pretty good! Much better than a bare wall, and having the tall ceilings makes the whole scene a little more dramatic and exciting.

The beginning of my Gray Period

Home-improvement activities tend to ebb and flow in this house. We’ll go from having a rush of ideas, to sitting idly by for 8 months at a time, only to get the bug again.

Recently, we got the bug again.

It started with our hallway. We have been talking about painting it since day one, because it’s been an unappealing shade of diarrhea brown (sorry for the disturbing visual, but it’s pretty accurate). We’ve changed a few of the colors the previous owner left for us, but mostly out of personal preference. This one, however was just a plain bad color (sorry if the previous owner happens to read this — but I stand by my statement!). While it wasn’t a ridiculously dark color, since the hall is completely internal to the house with no direct sunlight, we knew we wanted to lighten it up to make it feel airier. We figured gray would be a nice, neutral color. And, not wanting to repeat the same mistake of randomly picking a color from a piece of paper, ending up not liking it, and repainting a few months later, we decided that we’d actually do a few test swatches.

No amount of Lightroom editing can tone down the ugly color

One of the colors was just a little too dark, the other just not quite right. We looked at them for a few days and nights, and then because a calculated method for choosing the color just wasn’t my style, I flat out picked one off the internet (having already forgotten my resolution to not do just that).

One day while following link after link after link, I came across the fantastic DIY blog Young House Love. It is great, so if you haven’t read it, do so. While perusing some of their posts, I noticed they had an ideal soft light gray color in many of their rooms, including a hallway (hooray!), where they added a frame gallery (a setup I would later go on to blatantly rip off). So I told myself “Hey, Kelley, it looks awesome on the internet, so let’s just go for it”, and ran off to Benjamin Moore to get a gallon of their color (Moonshine) and get to work, completely disregarding my previous lesson about picking a color without testing it on your wall first. Alex was traveling for work for the whole week, so I went at it all by myself, doing a few hours of work each night once I got home.

I decided to use the sprayer rather than the traditional roller / brush method, because I naively thought it would be faster.

Let’s have a little sidebar about roller / brush vs. sprayer:

We got the paint sprayer a while ago (the most basic model from Lowe’s) because 1) I am always looking for a shortcut, and 2) I am a very sloppy painter. So in my mind, the sprayer would 1) help me go faster, and 2) force me to tape off some more so I don’t end up splashing paint everywhere. A word to the wise: it doesn’t really make a whole paint job go much faster. As far as I can see, the biggest benefit of using the sprayer is that the in-the-moment painting is faster, and it dries more quickly (since you end up applying very thin coats), allowing you to recoat sooner. But what you save in paint-application time you pay back in prep work. So while it’s got some advantages, I wouldn’t make a blanket statement saying it’s overall faster or easier than the traditional roller / brush method.

Back to the paint job. In a room like our hallway, without any uninterrupted walls (it is, after all, a hallway, so there are 6 doorframes and two stairwells to consider), the sprayer was a bad choice. It took me almost 4 hours just to tape everything off. I also went very slowly, because I was taping off our ceiling, and even on a ladder, my 5’2″ self couldn’t easily reach the top of our 9′ ceilings. So that was a pain.

Once everything was taped off, it looked a bit like a scene from Dexter in there — this photo shows all of the tape & newspaper, but it was before I put plastic dropcloths everywhere (I ended up hanging one from the sloped ceiling above the stairwell, to protect the stairs, so there was a giant plastic curtain).

But then I did my primer, and things were already looking better. Two coats of paint (and three nights) later, I finally pulled off the tape to reveal our much-improved hallway.

So, full disclosure: while I initially was in love with it, and patted myself on the back for picking something off the internet, I have since come to realize that it’s just a little too light and blue / silvery for this particular space. However, I like it about a million times more than the previous color, and the almost blue undertones don’t bother me enough to repaint it (no way, no how). Plus, I rationalized that the blue-ish tones (I’m probably completely inaccurately describing this, because I’m a color n00b) probably tie nicely into the blue-gray of the bedroom color. Probably. I figure a new coat of crisp white trim paint (the current trim is already white, but in dire need of repainting) will really help the gray pop (plus, as I previously hinted, I went on to fill up one of those walls with white frames, just like in my inspiration, so that helped, too).

Before & After

It’s making me crazy that the before & after pictures are at slightly different angles with a slightly different tone – so I’m sorry about that. Also the before picture is marred by the test-swatches, but that’s just because it really wasn’t worth photographing before. Also, while up on the ladder taping, I realized one of the bulbs in the fixture was burnt out (which I still haven’t replaced), so it’s a little dimmer than it would usually be. Hopefully, though, you can fully appreciate how much better it looks, even with my poor photography skills.

And of course this transformation kicked off what I’ll call my “gray period” ….(<— that’s foreshadowing)