Gallery Walls and Family Room Ideas

Apparently most of the blogs I follow are written by people who have a life, so the end of last week and first part of the weekend I had no blogs to read.

This week I have added I think three new blogs to follow this week. I found all of them through thenest.com on a Blog Tuesday thread on the decorating forum. Now that I am all married I have migrated over to The Nest since I need to keep up on my decorating, gardening and theoretically cooking too. (Not that I have to be a housewife now, it's just that I don't have the wedding to work on, so I am trying to work on my housekeeping skills, it's a lifelong project for sure)

One of the blogs is proving me some great inspiration: Mrs. H. This is one of my new blogs, although I have seen her comments on a lot of the other blogs I read. This inspiration is a sweet book shelf with a gallery wall above.

I am all about gallery walls, or so I have discovered through my decorating blogs (of which I have like 5 that I follow now, seriously an awesome pastime!). For those of you who may not know, a gallery wall is a wall of photos and other objects together on one area of a wall. Like this:

(Courtesy of The Inspired Room's Gallery Wall Party)

 As you can see it is usually mostly pictures, but you can add in whatever you want. You can make it symmetrical or uneven. The possibilities are endless!

This is the staircase to the upstairs, which is where I think I would put a gallery wall for now:

Just the usual staircase pictures collection. I could see me having one in the living room too, but that room is definitely going to change a lot, so for right now, it is not worth the effort.

I do have a lot of picture frames (ok, some picture frames) that are mostly unused. So I will need to put them somewhere are some point.

Overall for a gallery wall I think I would be mostly inclined to do more of a matching and symmetrical thing.

The other part of the new blog I am following, Mrs. H, is the shelving. I really want to add a bunch of shelving here in the family room:

I want to do shelves/bookcases/cabinets along the wall behind the couch. (There is like 5 feet between the wall and the couch, so plenty of space)

I want to relocate the DVD case (below, to the right) over there and get matching everything else to go along with it.

Then I kind of want to get shelves spaced above the even row of bookcases/cabinets and decorate those.

Like this (I am actually kind of impressed at my skills here!):

I also want to use the bookcase/main shelf level as a small place to put things like my purse/keys/phone when I get home. We don't really have much of a place for an entry way, but the corner by the stairs (where you can see I already place my stuff) is like 9 feet from the garage door, so really it is still the entryway.

I don't want to make it too busy, but right now it is just open space and I feel like it is a great opportunity to make great use out of it. Our DVD case is already more than full so we need another one of those and then I can put some of our pictures and wedding details in/on the shelves. Brilliant!

This is also where IKEA comes in handy I would imagine. I am off these next two days, so I may have to go sneak over there while Dylan isn't looking. Just to look, no worries.