Photo Hanging DIY

Normally people don't refer to photo hanging as a DIY project because duh, of course it's DIY. But I seriously struggled hanging my frame collage in my living room (we live in a one room box I don't know why I kid myself by referring to one corner of it as "the living room" haha).

I was inspired by images like these - so I when I gathered my frames, I layed them all out on the ground before I began. 

Hanging frames is not a two person job as Jake and I soon found out. I asked him to help, but by help I meant "hold them up" while I stood back and decided which shapes I wanted where. He just wanted to hammer them all in and we got into arguments about the best way to do it.

Leveling frames is the difficult part. All the frames had 2 hooks so I needed to get the two holes level, and spaced out exactly right. I finally came across this trick (found at http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-tol-hanging-frames-with-tw-61257 ) where I used masking tape on the back of the frame to mark where the nails need to be, and then I stuck the tape on the wall and used my leveler on the tape - then nailed the holes.

Another unforeseen problem was the junky plaster walls that are here. One time I nailed a nail in and I hit a cavity in the plaster so the entire bit of the wall collapsed leaving a pretty nice-sized hole in the wall that I just covered with a frame. We'll deal with that later.

Once I hung them all up - everything looked fine and dandy. We left the frames sit empty for about 2 and a half months. I finally received photos that I ordered in the mail today and placed them in the frames tonight. I wanted to do something cool with the frames like put old maps in them or sketches but we both thought we should use our new wedding photos - and we didn't have time to hunt down that other stuff. 

Another difficult task is hanging wedding photos in a small apartment without transforming your apartment into a "wedding shrine." We mixed it up with details and flowers from the big day and engagement scenes of us fishing. We also only hung up a collage and then photos above our bed - so it's really not a lot of frames everywhere you look.

*Special shout out to those who sent frames from our registry :) , the ones I used are from Pottery Barn and Bed Bath and Beyond. 

(Kindly Ignore that wrinkly white linen pillowcase - Jake thought it was a good idea to sleep on it so he needs to iron it haha)



On the other corner of our home we worked on this: