hanging and rearranging

Zach and I went on vacation to London a few months ago. I didn't necessarily expect us to get much in the way of souvenirs, so a big part of my plan for the trip was to get some really great classic-shot photos, print them in black and white, and frame them up in our house. Well, mission accomplished. In my personal opinion, I was able to get some pretty great shots. 

I hadn't had photos printed anywhere in a really long time, so I asked some Facebook friends for recommendations. I didn't get many, but one of them was mPix.com, so I went there. I got eight 8x10 mostly black and white photos printed (I did some selective colorization of a few things, like the iconic red telephone booth). Then I went to Michael's where, luckily, they were having a buy one get one free sale and 8x10 wall frames :-D

Then it was a matter of figuring out where to hang all these photos. We don't actually have a lot of big walls available -- most are filled with windows, and the others are covered with big furniture or other art. So I'd been thinking I'd have to split up the photos, but as I was pondering where and how to do that, I had the brilliant idea that I could just MOVE one of our other art pieces off the long wall in our main hall. DUH! 

We'd just move that red painting on the right across the hall to the weird-shaped empty wall above the recycle bin.

I asked Zach what he thought, and he agreed it was a good plan. So then I got to work laying out the photos, figuring out which should go where. Michael's hadn't had 8 frames all the same, so I'd gotten 4 and 4, so I wanted to kind of mix around the frames, so the same ones weren't all grouped together. I'd also done 4 photos with some selective colorization and 4 straight black and white, so I wanted to mix those around too. 

I got a layout I was OK with and then enlisted Zach's help for the hanging. We started at the far right. We measured the height of the entire group and just eye-balled where we wanted that on the wall. The first picture was going to be pretty much centered on that overall height, and we knew where its edge was supposed to be (about even with the light switch plate), so then I just held up the picture and stuck my finger down where the hanger was on the back. I handed Zach the picture while keeping my finger marking the spot, and he handed me a nail. And that's about how we went the whole way, measuring distance between pictures, eye-balling height, getting pretty close with holding the picture up and sticking a finger by the hanger. I didn't care if it was all super precise, as long as the spacing looked generally pleasing at the end. And I think it does :-)

We hung the other picture up on the opposite wall, and now we have more art-covered walls!