How to Hang a Gallery Wall

I’ve been getting the itch to re-decorate our bedroom lately. I decided to do it one piece at a time so that I don’t break the bank all at once. If you’re unaware, I absolutely love Harry Potter, and Jake agreed (surprisingly willingly) to have a few Harry Potter things in our bedroom when we moved in together. Nothing too over the top. The pictures, books on the nightstand, and the pillow.

I wasn’t sure how I’d want to decorate once we moved, so I’ve been feeling it out. I knew a lot of it would be temporary going in. We’ve been here for almost 6 months, and I finally think I’ve decided how to do it. It will look completely different in the next two months! I’ll be sharing more of the before and after journey as we go.

Side note, growing up my mom always loved to re-decorate our house. Every few months she would take things down, re-hang them, move the furniture around and just rearrange everything. The kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, living room. Not all at once, probably like once a year. It always looked amazing, and my sister and I would be enlisted to help her. So I am definitely my mother’s daughter because I love to rearrange and change things up.

I have a new comforter and lamps picked out that I plan on getting probably next month, but I’ve been wanting to change something for so long, I had to start somewhere! I decided this week that that starting point would be to take everything down and creating a Gallery Wall in our room.

I think the best thing so far is that it actually makes our room feel bigger. There is more space on all of the other walls laying down, so it just looks like more space. Our room is pretty big, but we have a lot in it. Feeling like it’s bigger is a wonderful change.

So, how do you do a Gallery Wall?

Step 1: Remove everything from the walls. Take all pictures in the room down. Or if starting from scratch, get everything together.

Step 2: Lay it out. Move to an area large enough to fit everything. Arrange the pictures to your liking on the floor. Get an idea of how they all fit together. There are many different styles you can choose from for a Gallery Wall. A few examples are here and here. I did mine surrounding a midline.

Step 3: Copy the pattern. Once you get them how you like them, grab some tissue paper or Kraft paper and make cut-outs the size of the pictures in their frames. Mine weren’t exact, but close enough to get an idea of sizing on the wall.

Step 4: Mock it up. Tape the cut outs up on the wall. See how the height of everything feels, the spacing, etc. My first layout actually didn’t end up fitting on the wall, so I had to re-do the layout and try again. Had I just started hanging, it would have a lot of extra unnecessary nail holes in the wall.

Step 5: Mark the nails. If you’re able to, mark where the nails are on the paper so that you can save yourself some struggling with measuring again and trying to get things right. Do it before hand and then just tear the paper away.

Step 6: Hang them up. Adjust them to your liking, make sure they’re straight/even.

Step 7: Admire your work!