Our house is pretty small (especially since we rent out the basement as a one-bedroom apartment — see that reno here), so we really want to make the best of every space. The hallway had long been neglected, so we figured it was about time to inject a bit of personality. Here’s what we were starting with:

Booo-ring. I did this project a bit backwards. I decided to put up some artwork and then to paint (you should usually paint and THEN add the artwork..!). Look at me going all wacky. Seriously living on the edge here. Alright, so since we were on a slim-to-no budget (what else is new?!), I tried to make do with what we had. In our first apartment we had a bunch of 8×10 photographs of our travels in border-less clip frames. These had been wallet-friendly to begin with (they were $1 each at the dollar store), but this time around they were even more so (already owned = $0). So I tore out some magazine sheets which were roughly the same size as the frames and arranged them on the wall. I knew some pics would be landscape and some horizontal, so I chose a fairly square overall layout to keep things looking balanced. I also threw 5 frames on the other side of the wall.

So after putting the nails in the wall and liking the artwork setup, the next step (in my backwards project kind of way) was to give the hallway a coat of paint. We hadn’t painted it since we moved in, so it was still the glossy white that the whole house had been. We thought it would be nice to have a bit of contrast with the white trim, so I grabbed a bunch of paint chips in the very light gray category. I did my usual thing of taping up a bunch of paint chips and checking them out at the different times of day to see how the colours changed with the light. In the end we settled on Silver Drop by Behr.

So after a very quick bit of painting (that’s the beauty of a small house – painting projects are lickity split) this is how things are looking.

It definitely looks a lot more polished, clean, and just adds some interest to the space. The last few folks who were over at our place definitely lingered on their way to the bathroom…!

And there you have it. A one-day project with a lot of impact. Eventually I would like to change out these el cheapo frames with some that are a bit more substantial (probably my fave white IKEA Ribba ones).. but these totally do the trick for now.

Any painting projects up your sleeve lately? Or maybe you have done a picture gallery in your pad too? 

Tags: clip frames gallery, gallery hallway, hallway picture gallery, travel photography gallery

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 at 2:44 pm and is filed under artwork. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.