A Tweaked Layout and a New Gallery Wall

As I mentioned last week, I just finished a gallery wall in our dining room. This has been coming on for about a year. Yes, you read that correctly…a year. Life, I tell ya. We should win some kind of slowest home decorator award or something. 😉

Last year, on a whim, we rotated our dining room table to give us more space in the walkways. It really helped, but I had to scoot the teal cabinet down to accommodate the new layout. Of course, that made the painting on the wall feel off centered from the cabinet, but centering the painting above the cabinet in the new location made the painting feel off centered on the wall. Ugg. If you give a mouse a cookie…

I love the painting that was in our dining room. Growing up, I traveled with my grandparents a lot. When I was 14, we went on a cruise together. My grandma is a painter and loved looking at the different art shops on the islands. We found the watercolor print in St.Thomas and Grandpa had it framed for Grandma. It hung in our hallway at home for years, then a couple years ago, Grandma gifted it to me. I really cherish that painting and all of the memories attached to it! I am sad that it doesn’t work in our dining room anymore, but love its new location at the top of our stairs.

I was pretty stumped about what to do in the dining room, though. Jeremy really liked the new layout. It’s not my favorite, but it’s his one request for the room. He doesn’t care about the paint color, artwork, linens, curtains, nada. He only requested that we keep the table in the new spot, so I felt like the poor guy should get what he wanted! I stared at the empty spot on the wall for months trying to decide what to put up.

I finally decided that a gallery wall was the way to go because it could stretch from the edge of the window to the corner, allowing the artwork to be centered on the wall while also allowing the teal cabinet to look natural although it wasn’t centered under the artwork.

We picked up most of the frames at Ikea and Target. I loathe the Ikea frames. I like the shape, but the mats were off white, so I ended up having to spray paint them white to match the frame and not look dingy. And don’t even get me started on the horrible hardware that comes with the smaller frames! The one positive aspect about the Ikea frames, though, is that they are dirt cheap. But, you get what you pay for. :/

I had a bunch of pictures and artwork picked out for the frames, but when I hung them all up, they didn’t jive well together. I ended up switching out the pictures and artwork to things that had a similar base color pallet or complimentary colors. It really helped give the whole gallery a cohesive look!

If you missed the how-to for the Truly Madly Deeply painting, you can check it out here!