A Little Entryway Gallery

As we head off into this weekend we wanted to leave you with another fun little home project we took care of this past weekend — a miniature photo gallery in our front entryway.
We've mentioned before having lots of wall frames from the old house that have sort of been hanging out while we decide what to do with paint and furniture — but sometimes the inspiration strikes, like with our kitchen nook. That's what happened with our front entryway while we were getting the house straight for our party, we decided to go ahead and hang up a grouping of black and white framed family photos that Tim had on the walls of his old house since before I moved in.

Under close supervision, Tim began hanging them up in a grouping:

They looked great once hung up and were the perfect fit for that smaller space — but I had an idea to further fill them out and add a little more the "blended history" of the collection.

Having a couple older family photos of my own on hand, I grabbed a couple similarly matted affordable wall frames from Michael's (they always have great deals on simple frames, *see tip below) and incorporated them into the mix since I thought the entire collection might be nicer as a variety of both our family's photos.

In this view you can really see the difference in the older and new frames, but I think they still somehow work together as a collection and it's harder to tell when you're not looking for it:

Here's a breakdown of the different shots:

Above we've got the now familiar but original photo of my mother, grandmother and aunt and beneath that we've got this amazing shot of toddler Tim with his mother, Carol. Yes, I realize I broke the code of all black and whites with the photo of my mom, but I just thought it fit in there.

Pictured to the left of the shot of my mother is a black and white of Tim and his two children, Stephanie and Brandon "hanging out" at the pool.

Finally, pictured above are a shot of Tim as a new baby with his father, Steve, and beneath that a shot of my two maternal grandparents (Alice and Gene Szigeti) soon after they got married here in Virginia. Here's a closer shot since this original photo is literally tiny:

I got it in there with a little double-sided tape and lots of love. I love that these two photos are so close together since both my grandfather and Tim's dad emigrated from Hungary over to America at different periods of time. Tim is technically 1/2 Hungarian while I am 1/4, but it's one of those things we absolutely love that ties us and our families together.

A while back I came across this wall gallery template for different arrangement inspiration on Pinterest, originally via Ann Beck Photography:

While we didn't use a template for the little arrangement we put up in our entry, I find this collection of ideas SO useful and love having it on hand for when we really start hanging things up. It will also be useful for when we decide to add more photos to this particular entryway gallery if they don't work well with the current arrangement.

*Coupon Tip: Speaking of Michael's craft stores, I do have a little shopping tip if anyone is interested. This may be a weird tip, but I've found it to be very useful AND it helps me save money so I'm going to share it. For those of you familiar with Michael's craft stores, you probably know they have great sales on all sorts of different things every week, especially wall frames and custom framing projects. I've signed up for their email list to stay posted on the deals but oftentimes either forget to print the coupons out or can't find them on my smartphone when in the store — you have to go through a lot of clicks to get to the coupons from your phone email in general.

So here's the tip: One day I figured out Michael's automatically updates the same webpage with new coupons each week so I simply sent myself an email with this link in it to pull up when in the store.

If that link doesn't work for you (it might be by my store location) then just go here and select "weekly ad" — make sure to set your store location and on the right sidebar under all the coupons click the red button that says "see all coupons." The page you are taken to is the link you should either email yourself or save as a bookmark on your phone. Then you can just pull it up anytime you are at the store — you won't have to print them or anything, just pull up the ones you want while at the register and they will scan your phone. Easy Peasy.

Here's a shot of the final arrangement just before everyone started to arrive, right along with our newly painted front room:

We're making small changes little by little! We probably won't tackle anymore home projects over the immediate weekend, though we do have a full schedule and a few more projects to share over the next week that we've knocked out! What have you got planned?