Week One: Finished Project

Well, almost a finished project. There's still room to grow. I had some pictures already framed and ready to go with the basic theme of having black and white photos in black frames. Now that didn't exactly work out as you can see some red in the photo to the right "Initial Layout" photo.

First thing's first with this project though - I needed to find the perfect letter. I started at Michael's first and found something that I thought might work, but it was a little small. It was already painted black so I bought it. The second stop was JoAnn's and they had a great variety of cardboard and wooden letters. I got the size I wanted and headed to Home Depot to buy black spray paint for under $1. They had matte and glossy and I chose glossy.

Once the letter was painted and dried, it was time to layout the photos. Some photos did not end up making the cut because they didn't have proper hanging hardware on them (I'll save that for another week's project).

I wanted the bottom three photos to be lined up along the bottom, so measurements were made so that the bottom of the frames were eight inches from the top of the mantle. My husband measured and tested out the spacing on the wall. As for the letter, we needed to make sure that you couldn't see gold nails sticking out, so I marked the top of the nails with a black marker so that it wasn't noticeable.

As you can see in the "After" picture, there's still a ton of space up there, but I'm seeing that as room to grow. Lesson learned on the picture frames that didn't make the cut too - even if you find good deals on the frames, make sure they have proper hardware installed for hanging, otherwise you have that obstacle in your way.