It’s always easy to start decorating the big ticket rooms in a house — the bedrooms, the bathrooms, and obviously, the kitchen. But when it comes to hallways and random alcoves, if you’re anything like me, it’s hard to envision what you can do with the space.
Our hallway is smack in the middle of our living spaces and our bedrooms, so we knew it was going to get LOTS of use. Plus, it’s right off the front door and one of the first things you see when you come to our home. We knew the original parquet flooring, dingy beige paint, and boob circular lighting was not going to fly for long.
Our main objectives for the space: lighten it, brighten it, change the flooring, change the paint, and make the space as cute and useable as possible.
BEFORE
It’s disgusting, I know.
While we waited for the floors to come in and picked out the paint color, we began assembling a gallery wall. I had bought a bunch of these frames from walmart, all in different sizes, and wanted to play around with the way they could be displayed.
THE GALLERY WALL
Gallery wall tip #1: Lay your frames or objects out on the floor first; it’s really easy to move them around and it lets you see what arrangements you might like (modern, symmetrical, eclectic, etc) Once you find a few arrangements you like, snap a few pics so you can remember how you had them laid out.
Gallery wall tip #2: cut out paper in the size and shape of your frames or objects and use painters tape to play with the display on your wall. The pics from the floor trials are great, but ultimately seeing them on the wall gives you the best idea.
Gallery wall tip #3: Once you have the gallery wall placeholders taped to the wall, the real magic can happen. And by “magic” I mean the easiest installation of your life. Because we use paper as placeholders it makes it perfect to just nail or screw right through it and into the wall. No need to take the paper off, guestimate where the hole should go, etc — it’s SO easy with paper placeholders!
We finally finished the gallery wall, and it looked pretty good (there was an intercom system and and a fuse box from 1952 we had to work around), but the rest of the hallway still had a long way to go. We swapped out the boobie light (why were these EVER a thing?! at least ours didn’t have a nipple…) for this track lighting. I was originally super opposed to track lighting because I was having 1980s flashbacks, but turns out they’ve come a long way with the design and now it looks more like art gallery lighting, which was perfect. Also love how much light it gives off.
We added crown and floor molding from home depot, paint from behr (color: metro gray), trimmed out the doorway with white, changed the flooring to these wide boards that we LOVE, and decided to make the other part of the wall useable space for our entryway. I linked a few options for mirrors here and here, some options for hook shelves here, here, and here. I also love that in this bottom reveal picture you can see the remodel we did in the kitchen! We’ll save that for another day…
Do you have a gallery wall in your home? I really do think they are such a sophisticated way to show your memories or favorite artwork. If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment below! And if you want more home decor inspo be sure to follow me here on pinterest 🙂
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