Dining Room Gallery Wall

As I've mentioned before, we have a long, narrow dining room. I have already tried to create the illusion of more space and light with my Pottery Barn Eagan Mirror knock off, but the fact remains that the room is still less than 10 feet wide. (What were the builders thinking??) To make matters worse, the breakfront against the right wall was eating up precious space. When sitting on that side of the table, it was nearly impossible to push out your chair and stand up between the table and chair, rather you kind of had to slide in and out from the side. I guess it wouldn't be so bad if we only used the room a few times a year, but we use it every single week for our Shabbat (Sabbath) meals.

If you noticed that the shelves are mostly empty, you'll be correct when you guessed that we decided to sell it. I went through everything that we stored in there and gave away the stuff that I didn't use. Do I really need 12 vases? Definitely not, especially considering that I use the same ones all the time! But now we had another blank wall to deal with. I had been wanting to put a gallery wall somewhere in the house and I knew this would be a perfect spot. My hubby wasn't so sure about it and needed some convincing before we put all those holes in the wall.

So I got out a roll of paper, traced each frame that I planned on using, cut them out and hung them on the wall so he could get a good idea of what I had in mind. He was still on the fence so I went a step further. I took a picture of each piece of art/frame and photoshopped them onto the wall. I tweaked the placement a little once I saw how the frames looked against each other so I am actually glad that I did this extra step. (Interestingly enough, Brooke just did a post about photoshop decorating in reference to a gallery wall. Dare I say great minds think alike? :-)) I sent it to him at work and he gave me the green light. When he got home later that day, he said, "Why did you take all the pictures off the wall?" My photoshop skills were so good (in his eye) that he thought I had actually hung everything up already! Love that hubby of mine!

I planned to use only gold and black frames to make it more cohesive since all the frames were different styles. And at first I thought we'd use only black and white photos, but in the end we liked using color. I also included some printables that I found on pinterest to add some variety, and here is the finished wall.

The square artwork on the bottom is a 3D paper cut of the "Woman of Valor" (from Provers 31) that my hubby gave to me after we got married. The vertical piece was a wedding gift from a neighbor that has our wedding invitation mounted with a nice glossy finish over it. The gold frame has a metal-cut street scene of the Old City of Jerusalem. To the right of that is a personalized lithograph of the blessing given to a bride and groom that my parents had the artist create for us when we got engaged. The smallest frame (you can see it better in the picture below) has etched in the glass "Zecher L'Churban" (Hebrew for "in remembrance of the destruction," referring the the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Rather than get into a long explanation about that, please feel free to email me if you're interested.) The big letter "B" is from Michael's - just a few dollars on sale. The rest are all family photographs that I can easily update.

You can see there are a few brown frames also mixed in that I originally planned to spray paint black, but now I'm leaning towards keeping them brown (and not just because I'm being lazy!). I think they add some warmth to the wall. What do you think - spray them black or keep as-is?

I really like how it came out and what I love the best (besides being able to sit at the table comfortably) is that I can see the gallery reflected in the mirror right from my seat - I can enjoy two walls of something I created at the same time!

Have you worked on any wall art lately? What do you think about mixing and matching frames?

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