Ancestry Accent Wall

Renovation part 1!

The wall across form the stairs in my house was a disaster. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of it in its original glory (?), but it was a mess. Against the wall was an old, out of tune piano that no one played, covered in junk, books, and a broken lamp. There was a marble top table with the old landline on it. This wall and space in general had not had an update in a few millennium. It was time.

These are the deets:

The space: Piano wall/ surrounding area

Current use: junk corner

Renovation: Turn wall into a homage to family photos by moving piano, repainting, framing loose photos, show casing family antiques.

- Dry wall mud/ knives

- paint brushes/ pan

- drop clothes

- new paint color

- 2 bottles of gold spray paint

- scrap paper & pencil

- hanging nails/ tacks

- hammer

- glass cleaner & rag/paper towels

- Goodwill frames

I couldn't start painting till I'd moved the VERY heavy piano, marble table, removed the mirror that hung on the wall, and swept.

I washed the walls and the baseboards. I re-mudded and sanded the wall where it was needed. I covered the floor and any surrounding furniture with drop clothes.

Preparing everything in advance made it very easy to start painting. Once I started painting it went very quickly. I'd bought a pint of semi-gloss paint that was a rich blue. It took two coats, but even then there was still a little paint left.

Many of the family photos I wanted to put up on the walls were loose and scattered throughout the house or they were inside dusty old frames. I took all the photos out of the frames and cleaned the glass as well as the frames. After I'd cleaned the frames and their glass, I spray painted the frames gold. Once the frames dried, I replace all the photos in them. Since there were so many loose family photos, I bought some gold frames from Goodwill.

After the pictures were reframed, I placed them on pieces of scrap paper and traced their outline. I cut out these outlines and wrote on them what picture went with each. For example: large rectangle with "Florida Family" on it.

On the scrap paper I also measured where the hanging wire/ hanging clip were for each frame. These measurements were approximate and not exact.

Once I had all the pictures in their scrap paper form, I arranged and taped them on the wall. It was easy to try out different placements using the scrap paper method.

Once I arranged all my "paper frames" on the wall, I followed the X I'd put on the "paper frames" to show where the nail would need to be for that frame.

Hanging the "paper frames" before made it so much easier to arrange and rearrange my frames! I never had to nail something twice, because it was off. If I'd put something up that looked off I was able to easily move it around since nothing was permanent.

The wall quickly started to come together once I'd gotten my "paper frames" up.

After hanging up all my frames, I was done!