Family Room Gallery Wall

Our family room is the center of our home. It is part of a great room that encompasses the kitchen and eating area, and it is always bustling with activity...and noise...and crumbs. Because it's such an important part of our home, I feel like the area needs to be warm, inviting, and a place we really want to be in. We have a really beautiful fireplace and mantle, but it's really, really big. Like Alice took one too many swigs from the "drink me" bottle-big. The scale is off, and I've always felt like it dwarfed everything in the room, which has left me confused about how to create balance in the room. Because of that reason, it's taken a long time for me to take on the challenge of decorating the space.

For a while I had a few frames hung next to the tv along with this awesome piece of furniture that we use as a blanket holder, but it was such a puny attempt at decorating that I've never even taken a picture of the whole wall.

I finally decided to move the blankets and replace it with a chair and side table (the ones from my bedroom) and create a large scale gallery wall to add some height to the area of the room and hopefully make the fireplace feel a little less behemoth.

Gallery walls are stressful! I have done three in my house now and I thought this time would be easier, but I still found myself second guessing nearly every choice I made. I started out by choosing frame colors. I decided to match the color of the credenza and go with a dark walnut color, as well as white and thin silver frames. I had about half of the frames already, (which was another reason for choosing those colors, lets be honest,) and the rest I scored at Michael's thanks to a huge clearance sale. With the dimensions of the wall in mind, I laid everything out on the floor to see how it looked. Once I had an arrangement I was okay with, I started thinking about what to put in the frames.

I wanted things that meant something to us, so I put a couple of family pics, a picture of the temple, some artwork that Abby and I have done, and the rest I downloaded from Etsy shops and printed. Two of my favorites on the wall are this bokeh piece from Becky McCreary

and this abstract art by Jessica Torrant

I put all the art and pictures in their frames and stepped back and looked at the collage, but I felt like something was missing. I had made this chevron artwork at a church craft night, but didn't have a place to put it, so on a whim, I decided to add it to the collage and that's when I felt like the wall really started to come together. To balance it out a little I also added an M that I painted gray to match the chevrons.

Then I hung it up on the wall! And here's the finished product!

I was concerned that the wall would be too busy, but I like it! The space finally feels finished, which makes hanging out in that room even more fun!

I also love that the arrows on the wall mirror the arrows on the table, (which I took from the upstairs playroom.)

If you're interested in making a set of chevrons for yourself, you can find the tutorial HERE.