Working on the Wall

I've been meaning to decorate this wall upstairs for ages. My idea of a lovely gallery wall is something like this or this. 

When Anri came home from her last day of school with the poster she made with our family handprints (and paws) I figured I'd better frame it ASAP before it got crinkled, ripped, chewed up and/or lost. I found some cheap frames at Walmart and decided to get this gallery wall started! 

The plan is to completely fill this upstairs hall wall with photographs (color and black & white), the kids' artwork, objects and other cute stuff. 

Since the frames were black, I went ahead and put them up on the wall to see how they looked. I saw this gorgeous gallery wall with all kinds of mixed frames and thought it looked great. Keeping them black and adding in some other colors later would save me the effort of painting them. 

The black frames were OK, but a half-full can of off-white spray paint in the basement kept calling my name. I don't know about you, but I think the lighter color frames look a lot better. 

I may work in some gold and black frames down the road, but for now the white is working for me. I've got a whole bunch of little projects in mind for loading up the wall: displaying the old-fashioned keys that came with our house (we've since updated the locks), putting up their first foot prints, maps, blown up post cards, wedding photos and more!