After months of searching and finally buying a house of our own, M & I couldn’t wait to personalize our new place. I’ve never been creative with home decor, but thanks to Pinterest, I found a project for the two of us to tackle. With my OCD-ness for straight frames and M’s engineering brain (what better way to exercise that PhD?), a wall photo collage for our living room was the first thing we put together for our new house. Here are some useful tips for putting together a collage of your own.
To start it off, find frames that fit together into the shape you want. We wanted a rectangular block of photos to hang above our long sofa, so we went off to the neighborhood Michael’s. Play around with the frame sizes until you find ones that fit into the shape you want. We used a mix of frames matted to 4″x6″, 5″x7″, 8″x8″, and 11″x14″ photos (see diagram above for the dimensions).
The lifesaver in this whole project was finding [amazon text=3M picture hanging velcro strips&asin=B00404YKZI]. We didn’t want to hammer nails into the wall and these strips did just the trick! They are essentially velcro strips that can hold up to 16 pounds (weight table here). One side of the velcro strip goes on the wall and the other on the back of the photo frame. Even if you’re a little off on the strip placement itself, you can still readjust where the frame sticks onto the velcro so the frame is straight. Best of all, these strips are easily removable without leaving any sticky residue or marks behind.
For photos, I used a combination of printing services. You can get 55 4×6 prints for free at Snapfish upon joining and 50 4×6 freebies at Shutterfly as well. These companies always have free print gifts as well – I received 4 free 10×8 prints that I used for the square 8×8 frames. If you sign up for the e-mail newsletters you can always get new photos printed periodically to update your collage through the year. I’m still working on converting the photos in the wall collage to wedding pictures.
This is another link with seriously cool gallery wall art ideas for inspiration. Happy decorating!
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