DIY: How I Created My Entire Gallery Wall Under $35

I moved into a new apartment, which means I finally had an excuse to do some decorating. But, it’s no secret that with decorating a room, comes a price. In case you haven’t heard me excitedly flashing shots of my room on my Instagram stories, I picked a color scheme of white and rose gold so I could finally fulfill my gold rose obsession. (scroll further down for pics)

After multiple trips to Homegoods, Wayfair, and Ikea, I was satisfied with my new room but still had one big blank wall I was looking to fill. I looked for large canvases that would take up a large chunk of the wall, but all of them were far outside of my price range.  After looking at various Pinterest photos, I decided I wanted to create a gallery wall: a space with various decorations and photos that would look visually appealing when they were all placed together in no particular order. This led me to my next issue, gallery walls mean that you need many frames and items to fill up space, which would meant $$.

I narrowed down my options and decided that what I wanted was a few rose gold frames and found a set of 6 travel prints on Amazon.com for $64. Wtf, I was just going to splurge, but thankfully my friends and coworkers persuaded me that this would be such a big waste of money for something I could DIY.

So, I decided to get crafty (a little). I went to Michaels thinking I would find something, but most of the frame sets of 5 were over $30. After doing some searching, I found a set of 5 various sized rose gold frames for only $12.50 at Walmart linked here. Side Note: Yes, I’m a lifestyle blogger that buys some of her shit from Walmart. I don’t think it makes me any less glamorous, I think it makes me practical and hopefully relatable? I picked up these frames and then was on a mission to fill them.

Back to HomeGoods I went, searching for the perfect prints to fill my 5 new frames, but no luck for anything that would fit within the small budget I had left. Luckily, I discovered amazing sites with free stock photos. Free stock are photos that photographers put online that are available for commercial use at no price. If you get them from reliable sites, they are typically very high quality, no matter what you resize them to, so no worrying about them looking blurry or pixely when you send them to print.

Processed with VSCO with oc preset

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset

I found some of my favorite Rose Gold prints from websites such as pixabay.com as well as Pexels.com and imported them into VSCO so I could adjust the lighting and highlights to make them look similar and cohesive.

My last step was resizing these photos so that they would fit the frames. A site called Canva, which I would suggest for any picture or digital related project, allowed me to resize these photos to the perfect 4 x 6, 8 x 10, etc. I then sent the pictures to CVS and filled my frames with high quality prints two hours later.

Spacing the five prints across my wall definitely filled up a good amount of space, but my walls still needed something else. I had a Maryland decoration from my Aunt that definitely added character.

Maryland wall decor

I found these cute cork board hexagons on Target’s website and bought 2 sets of 3 ($7.99 each) that I could arrange uniquely. I filled these with personal photos, old tickets, and notes to complete my gallery wall and have now covered that blank space that I was staring at every time I got in bed to make it feel personal and homey.

Processed with VSCO with a4 preset

Processed with VSCO with a6 preset

So, next time you go face a blank wall, maybe you’ll think about this article and breathe a sigh of relief that it doesn’t have to be a big investment.

XO,

Sweetcaroline