Home Decor: Collage Wall

In our house, we have a long hallway leading from the living room to the office and bathroom.  Huge white space in a sorta-well lit area that was begging me for some color, especially inspired by variations online of this post. Since the majority of other photos in the house were all wedding related, I aimed to avoid that theme for the wall here. I wanted people to be able to find themselves on the wall when they come to visit. (Side note: We have zero photos of ourselves with many of our local friends. I need to get the camera out more! I just feel awkward and cheesy about it!)

So, what is not shown in these photos, is the mess on the fireplace I made for the probably 4 months that this was in work. I was collecting garage sale frames, painting all my old ones, cleaning the glass, and lastly, waiting to find pictures for them all.  (No problem on my side, but I figured it wouldn't be fair if none of the pictures are Zach's!)

So I painted everything black, then noticed a few of the frames didn't take the black so well. And it was an overwhelming amount of black. And I had this clearance bucket of aqua paint. So I repainted some.  The aqua wasn't glossy. So then I mod-podged those frames for some shine. (I know. Took forever. Hence 4+ months on the fireplace)

FINALLY.  Stocked up on command strips and ordered all the pictures and framed everything and put up the strips...and waited...the mandatory hour before you can hang things with command strips (this was the hardest part of all. And you really have to do it, since a picture, mirror, and mop-hanger have all fallen down after 6+ months because I did not follow that rule.)

So finally (again.) Here is the almost finished product!  I left some gaps in there because I want to put the letter "D" in one spot and I wanted to have room to expand with new photos.

 One of my favorites:

 View from the other side...

 Another favorite!

How do you use your photos to decorate your house?