Completed Picture Wall! (For now at least)

Well I finally finished my cheap version of the Pottery Barn picture wall! Go here to see theirs!! VERY pricey project if you buy their frames!!  My version looks pretty good for not spending any money!! The only thing I spent money on was printing the pictures and $8 for the mat board!  I designed mine so that I could add more pictures to it later on.  This is how I did it!

First you have to choose which pictures you will use and what sizes you want them to be.  This was the hardest part for me since I have about 9988492093809889 pictures of my kids.  Once they are printed, you need to mat them all.  I did NOT mat them the way pictures are supposed to be matted! LOL!  It's too expensive to buy actual mats and get them cut to fit each picture!  I bought 1 sheet of the bright white picture mat board from Hobby Lobby.  It was $7.99.  Then to save time and money, I just cut the mat to fit the frame and then taped the picture right on the mat.  It was pretty time consuming to do it my easy way.  I can't imagine how long it would take to actually cut the mat opening to lay on top of the picture like you're supposed to!  I should mention that before I even chose my pictures, I gathered all the frames I had in my house, so I knew how many pictures I should print.  I didn't want to have to buy any frames! When I work on a project like this, I have to have lots of space to lay everything out.

And of course having a cute little chubby boy to help is nice!

Here's another one of my secrets....

5 of the frames I had weren't black...until I hit them with some spray paint!  I already had a can of black, so it didn't cost anything!  And think of what I would have spent to buy 5 new frames!

After all your pictures are matted and framed, I would suggest laying them out on the floor or a large surface to see how you want them.  Then you can arrange and rearrange as much as you want until you like your design.  I wanted it to look somewhat random and not symmetrical.  Lay the biggest frames out first and then work your way down to the smallest.

Wanna know another secret?  5 of these pictures are matted on white computer paper!! Haha! I'll betcha $100 bucks you can't guess which 5!

Now it's time to transfer to the wall.  I MAY or MAY NOT have left the pictures sitting on the island in our kitchen for 3 hours days because I was dreading moving them to the wall.  When the time finally came that we needed our counter space back, I sloooooowly came up with my plan.  Here's a hint-once you get your arrangement the way you like it, take a picture.  I probably looked at my picture 30 times while hanging them on the wall.  I started with my biggest frame.  This picture is 10X13.

I found the center point of the wall and went from there.  While I didn't want my arrangement symmetrical, I still wanted it even on the wall!  One by one, I added the photos.  I am somewhat happy with the finished project, but now that it's on the wall, I see that I need 1 more picture on the top right and maybe a couple small ones in between.  I'll be working on that.  I also realized a few pictures are hanging crooked.  Those have already been fixed!  I HATE crooked pictures!!!

So what do you think??  Any suggestions?  Do you have a picture wall in your house?