My son turned five not too long ago.  I love that on my walls are my favorite images of him – the ones that reflect the pure boy that he is – through these last five years.  Like I said in my blog post “I Can’t Afford It” on custom photography, I want the images that show their individual idiosyncrasies.  The images that transport me back in time to feel the emotions I feel at the moment of the image capture.

I love how it feels to look back on my maternity images and remember the expectant joy and anticipation I felt the day it was taken.  I love seeing his big chubby cheeks that are so long gone.  I love how his smile is so exactly, precisely the same as it was when he first smiled.  And I love seeing just how opposite my three-year-old daughter’s images are.  She looks so very different at each stage, and yet her lips are distinct and remarkable and identical throughout all her other changes.

I love how it is our HISTORY that is being recorded on our very walls.  I love the legacy of it being written for their little souls to read and remember.  I hope that the display of the images of our family on our walls in yet one more way for us to communicate to them that we love them, we are so proud of them, and that we enjoy them.   It doesn’t take a big event to cause us to sit down and look through boxes or albums of photos – we take this memory journey every day as we walk the rooms of our home.  Early on we decided on a philosophy to guide us through family and financial decisions – we wanted to focus on making memories, rather than collecting things.  I love how the photos on our walls contribute to our value of memories.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that my love for gallery type displays does stem from the fact that I’m a horrible decision maker.  Everything is my favorite.  So instead of having to choose 3 images, I create galleries that let me choose 10, 20, or perhaps even more.

It started with the gallery display that Tina Wilson at Tina Wilson Photography designed for me with my favorite size – 10x20s.  We filled that with images from our year’s worth of sessions with her.  It is in my living room now.   I love it.  I’ve only replaced two of the images – I just can’t bare to part with any of them.  The two I replaced just moved to our bedroom.  I think I may very well end up just adding onto this display.  I still have wall space, right?

I have two other small groupings on the two walls flanking my feature wall.  And then I have a gallery wrapped canvas from our family photo session in 2010 in between the two large windows on the wall opposite the big feature grouping.  (I took these images on Christmas Day, so please forgive the holiday decorations)

The hallway was another space in my house with plenty of blank wall space that was begging for fun images.  I got creative with arranging frames that I had collected over the years.  I do love the result.  Plus most of these are 4×6 photo size, which means I can easily and cheaply change them out as much as I wish.  And then you can see another canvas to the right side of my front door.  I love how I see this beautiful memory of my son’s first trip to the beach every time I walk toward the stairs.

Later on, we had family photo sessions with Picsee Studios and I had a lot more images that I needed to display.  I was inspired by this idea that I saw in a Martha Stewart magazine;  two long rows of frames with a common horizontal line for the bottom of the top row frames and the top of the bottom row frames.  I morphed the idea so that the frame edges formed a huge rectangle and everything was filled in in the middle.  I’m an engineer and I like straight lines.  What can I say?  So my dining room transformed into this – Pace Family Central.

To do this, I physically laid out my design on the floor in front of the wall I put the frames on.  I played until I got the spacing just right.  I started with the top left frame on the wall and went from there when it came time to actually hanging the frames.  I kept with a similar ‘frames forming a larger rectangle’ theme for the other large wall space in the room.  It is two 10x20s on the bottom, two 8x12s on the top with an 8×8 in the middle.

Do you see the Albums displayed in the middle of the dining table?  I have around 10 photo session albums there, because I fall in love with every single image and cannot bare to part with any and must have them all in an album.  I have two black iron book hangers that are designed to be mounted on the wall.  I’m waiting to mount those under the two smaller frames you see in the bottom left picture below… once we have time to remove the hideous wall paper.

As time has passed, I’ve replaced some of the images with ones I’ve taken myself.  Shamefully though, I’ve not updated the images in about a year.  Perhaps that can be a project for this spring.  But perhaps we should address the hideous wall paper first.  Toile is soooooo not me.  It was in the house when we moved in (gasp) five years ago.  It’s on the list to tackle and remove.  We painted the living room in the awesome teal on the left in the below brochure (in November 2010… yikes).  The dining room will be this awesome avocado green…. Someday… so please just pretend my awesome black frames and displays are on this cool avocado green in these photos I’ve shared today, instead of weird rooster yellow and blue toile.

Lastly, we did a room makeover for our little girl for her birthday this year.  It included two gallery wrapped canvasses that we loved of her. I couldn’t share our home’s photo displays without including these.