Am I the only one with a major crush on gallery walls? I swear I’m not a hoarder, but there is just something so dreamy about an eclectic collection of frames and prints. I’ve been curating a Pinterest board on the subject (named “frames and gallery walls” – witty, eh?) for the last few months, and I just can’t wait any longer – it’s time to start my own!
Here’s some of my inspiration:
Mismatched frames, with prints from Etsy (all are under $40!) in colors that pop / Image via Southern Living
Clean white frames, with black and white photos / Image via Kerrisdale Design
Earthy prints in a large range of sizes, with a touch of gold / Image via Domino Magazine March 2009, from The City Sage Blog
Image via This Is Glamorous
And if Sherry and John at Young House Love didn’t invent the gallery wall, they definitely brought it to middle America. After spending time drooling over their frame-studded hallway, I am pretty sure 1) there is some kind of complicated calculus to creating a balanced look of frames (sadly, I am probably destined to fail!), and 2) I need to make more art to frame. Oh, and 3) Dara is going to hate me when I announce this project to him. He and I are both unskilled in the frame-hanging department, and this is going to be quite the project. (In case you were wondering what frame-hanging looks like in a household of two engineers…yes, it does involve measuring tapes. And a leveler tool. And sometimes calculators.)
Here’s Sherry and John’s gallery of frames:
Images via Young House Love
And they wouldn’t be famous, New York Times bestsellers without their awesome tutorials. Here’s their best-kept secret behind gallery walls: taping up magazine pages to plan out where each frame will hang. Brilliant, no?
Image via Young House Love
So, the cat’s out of the bag. I have a minor obsession with gallery walls. What else is new? 
I also love gallery walls! We recently put one up above our couch. Instead of newspaper, we laid out butcher paper in the dimensions we wanted the gallery to be (basically a giant rectangle), laid the frames on top of it until we found an arrangement that worked, marked where the nails went, and then nailed right through the paper into the wall. We peeled the paper off, hung the frames, and that was that. It was sooo easy.
Oh, how I would love a gallery wall! But alas, we’re not allowed to put nails in our rental apartment walls (which are solid concrete, so even if we were allowed, it would be a big deal). I’ll just collect frames while we wait. Keep us posted!
I was gifted a sort of Gallery wall frame set for my shower and thankfully, it came with something similar to what Molly engineered herself: paper cut-outs of the frames so we could place them on the wall. We also used a leveling tool and we also had to use a stud finder for our rental. It took half of a day just to get the damn frames up, so frustrating, but so worth it. Our staircase is much more full of love!