I hung the pictures on the wall tonight.

I had this grandiose plan to put some of the ~40,000 digital photos that I have on a wall in my family room and have it done in time for Thanksgiving. We bought picture frames at Ikea that fit what my design vision. I had mattes cut to fit the frames. Then, as I was just beginning to choose the pictures for the wall my hard drive crashed. It took a while, but I had the drive recovered and I got my photos back. Over the weekend, now that the holidays are just about over, we started the work. I had selected 61 photos. We whittled it down to 30. We started assembling the frames, hanging the picture frame wire (which SUCKS - thank you so very much Ikea), traded the existing 5x5 mattes with my new either 5x7 matte or 4x6 matte, and mounted the photos.

I bought a laser level and marked the wall. What I had hoped to have was 30 photos. They really wouldn't fit in the space available in the wall - we had to cut down to 24. Then I decided a design change, where instead of 3 rows of 8 frames, I decided for 3 rows with 8-7-8 frames, cutting the group down to 23 pictures. It was hard to come up with a final cut, but we did. (oh, and in the process of marking the wall, I dropped the laser level about 5 times, all of them barely missing Indy The Bunny's head, who was crawling around the floor at my feet wanting to know what I was doing. The second to last crash did the level in - it no longer auto levels, and I then just took measurements and manually adjusted the level. I LOVE the laser level! Too bad I broke it...)

The frames we bought are about an 1¾ inches deep, and there are two mounting positions within the frame for the matte - forward against the glass, or back against the back of the frame. i decided to alternate each picture in a row - front, back, front, back... etc So I had to go through the frames and set the spaces for front mount or back mount...

Then Carol cleaned the glass, sealed up the frames, and I hung them on the wall tonight.

A once empty wall now holds 23 pictures of family and friends. It was startling to see this once empty wall now filled with frames and photos.

And now... we're thinking about other walls...