When we moved into this house, one of the first things we did was buy a large-format picture to cover up the ugly metal panel on our living room wall. We got one of those IKEA canvases that covers the whole wall.
It stayed there for 15 years. We didn’t love it, but it served a purpose.
The other day, Molls and I went thrifting, and she found an old oil painting of a pair of swans under a weeping willow and a waterfall. It was said to be from the Victorian Era. We bought it and immediately agreed it should go in the living room.
But we were out of wall space.
“Maybe it’s time to do the gallery wall,” I suggested.
We pump-faked on the gallery wall several times, gaining some excitement and then watching that excitement fade as we couldn’t figure out the right configuration of all of the pictures we selected. And then we’d be left with our giant IKEA canvas. Again.
“I think it’s time,” I said.
So we rummaged through 4 boxes in the basement — the ones in the way back that made me sneeze; we went through the house and took pictures off the walls, and we laid them out on the living room floor.
Pretty overwhelming. Our living room became unusable for several days.
The epiphany happened midday when Molly was out visiting clients, and I’d just had a super awesome career counseling session.
I sat in my favorite rocking, swivel chair across from the gallery wall, and instead of frantically throwing paintings and pictures into place, I opened up my phone and typed “How do you do a gallery wall?”
9,000 articles popped up. After reading 3 of them, the themes were evident:
Find a theme, put the biggest pictures in the center and work outward, space them out 3 or 6 inches apart, don’t be afraid to interrupt your theme with something odd in shape or content, pay attention to the frames around the pictures, and, “if you really want to level up your gallery wall,” install a sconce to showcase your work.
I looked at the photos around the room. Lots of blues, golds, and raw wood. Landscapes and waterscapes seemed the dominant theme. Some frames were the same height, most stuff was vintage or just old, scuffed up on the edges, not nearly perfect — that’s kind of our thing.
Then I looked at the wall and pictured the pictures on it, but no matter what configuration I envisioned, that goddamn metal panel was in the way, about 3/4 the way up the wall and right in the center.
I went back to my phone, looking for answers, and there in the center of the wall in one arrangement was one of those “level your shit up” sconces, the base of which was the same circular shape as the dastardly metal plate on my wall.
Wait a minute…
Could it be?
I ran to my toolbox, found a flathead screwdriver, hopped up on the couch, and went to work on the panel. The screws were painted over and didn’t want to budge, but I worked them real good. The paint cracked around the edges, revealed the white underneath, and when the panel was off, wouldn’t you know it, there, inches from my face, were exposed wires underneath: a black one, a white one, an exposed copper one.
Hot damn.
I laughed out loud.
“You gorgeous little bitch.”
We had the pièce de résistance for a gallery wall, the hook-up for the coveted sconce.
It was on.
Suddenly, overwhelm was replaced by excitement and new to-dos that had to get done as soon as possible.
Multimeter out of the toolbox, batteries work, fuse is dead.
Hardware run. Do you have this fuse? Yes, great, can I test my multimeter? Yes, use this outlet. It works! Congratulations.
Home again, with a new fuse and a working multimeter (and two 9-volt batteries for dead smoke alarms).
Jump up on the couch, test the wires. They work!
The sconce shall be ours! The gallery wall will be illuminated.
Let’s go!
And where there once was exhaustion and overwhelm, now existed joy and anticipation.
I dived headfirst into the creative process of balancing color, theme, and spacing. Soon, the measuring tape, hammer, level, flashlight, picture hooks, nails, and pencil littered the window sills, floor, and mantle. My shirt off, feet bare, sweating in the late summer heat, I went to town on a wall that had been waiting for us for 15 years.
In our future… sconce shopping, a search for more pictures to cover the bedroom walls we made bare. Yes, and countless evenings basking under the tranquility of a self-made, well-lit, Internet-approved gallery wall.
Sometimes all you need is an unexpected discovery, a surprise gift from the universe (and a chuckle), to give you the energy and vision to move forward.
Framed Needlepoint, oil on wood, watercolor, water foul, 2D sculpture with found materials, a bashful angel, and one well-regarded electrical wall panel with exposed wires…
Friends and family (not pictured here) are soon to come. Charades, kids jumping off the end of the couch like a diving board, little slips of paper, long hugs, hellos, goodbyes.
Yes, yes. Life is good.