Renter's Plight | ANOTHER GALLERY WALL

These gallery walls are just EVERYWHERE, aren't they? Well I'm going to throw another one your way, just in case you're still unsure of how you want to lay out your gallery wall. (Oh hey ladies, notice the sexy man in that "before" picture? You can look but you can't touch!)

My particular gallery wall hurdle this time was a variety of devices attached to our wall (some of them non-functioning). I utilized some three-dimensional boxes to cover those ugly devices and add some interest to the typical frame set-up. By the way, I apologize for the poor quality of these pictures. I wanted to get natural daylight in the living room but then all of my frames had glare on them. It was a sad day.

Here were my basic rules:
1. I used all black frames with an accent gold frame.
2. I created a top and bottom border. All of my frames touched one (or both) of those borders.
3. When I continued the gallery across to an adjacent wall, I maintained the same center line for those frames. (The border was less relevant since all the frames were tall enough to only stack one high).

To make this process as smooth as possible, I used two tools:
1. Brown paper. I cut out the footprint of each picture and taped the entire gallery on the wall before hanging anything to make sure I liked the arrangement.
2. 3M velcro strips. When used correctly, these things are amazing for renters. I've never had one tear a wall before and they are pretty simple to use. However, they add up in cost quickly, and our walls were kind of slick so I had to apply extra pressure for extra long to each strip.

I suppose I should call this more of a gallery strip based on its size and shape. Whatever it is, I like how it frames out our living room. If I had my choice, the strip would be about a foot higher and go all the way above/behind our TV, but that darn security alarm box forced me to place the gallery lower (to hide it). I have such rough first world problems.