The photo wall...

So.
We moved into our house last October.
I KNEW I wanted to create a photo wall on this big wall in my living room.
But it wasn't really on the top of my priority list.
We had much bigger fish to fry.
Even though we weren't going to do it right away, I was still dreaming.

Earlier this spring, I had an open house benefiting The Adventure Project.
At the open house, I purchased a vinyl decal for my wall through Uppercase Living.
It read *LIVE simply * SPEAK kindly * LOVE generously.
We pretty much declared this our family mission statement.
I knew I wanted to incorporate it into our photo wall.

So I started saving some of my favorite photos in a file on my computer.
I cropped them down to squares.
I decided on 16 photos.
I ordered 10x10's from WHCC.com.
**When selecting finishing items, I chose the styrene board for mounting.
They ended up being around $7.50/print.
I think they are EXCELLENT quality. I was so happy when they arrived in the mail.
I order from WHCC regularly, and love them.

next, i had to figure out how to attach them to the wall.
I decided to use 3M command strips.
They are kind of like velcro and they aren't supposed to damage your walls.
They photos are pretty light, so I didn't think I needed anything too super heavy duty.
Plus, I figure I will be replacing these photos with updated ones pretty regularly, so I wanted something easy to switch out.
They worked perfectly!
(just mak sure you use 2 strips per photo.  i started with one and woke up the next morning to find the photos all laying on the ground! 2 works great though!!)

Now, you must know that Paul hung them. And he is pretty particular.
I am NOT.
We are a good team. :)

He has one of those laser levels.
And we decided to put one of the 3M command strips on the level to hold it in place for each row.
Did I mention Paul is also GENIUS?? He is.
It worked awesome!
If you look in the about photo, you can see it attached to the wall.

And then it was time to apply the Uppercase Living decal above the pictures.
And here's the final product...

I am IN LOVE with it.
I sat and stared at it for like an hour after we finished.
I'm not kidding.
The kids LOVE it, too.


It ended up being about $150 for the mounted photos and I THINK around $40 for the decal. I can't remember for sure on that though. Plus, the command strips were like $10. So we were at $200 exactly for the whole project. And I can update it for as little as $7 on a regular basis.

So fun.
You should do it.

**I downloaded the ROES option from WHCC and used that for ordering. When you become a client of theirs, you also get 5 free 8x10's. Added bonus. But it can be kind of confusing at first. I'm sure you could order the pictures with that type of mounting from lots of different online photo places. Just FYI.