Wall Art Upgrades: Travel Pictures

I've been more focused on improving the functionality of the house since we moved in- adding curtains to reduce the excessive sunlight and heat, getting a bigger table that can fit our guests, making bookcases and shelves to hold and organize our piles of stuff. Slowly, but surely, the house is coming along and getting furnished and functional, but it still feels somewhat cold and impersonal.

a blank-looking living room 

the empty entryway

An easy trick I learned long ago was to print off travel pictures and put them in simple frames. I think it's awesome for a couple reasons:

1. Generally, spaces look more complete when there are things on the walls.
2. My entire family likes to travel and has been to some great places, so we've got lots of interesting options to choose from.
3. A collection of simple frames helps group smaller pictures to cover a larger space.
4. When you post pictures from your own travels it reminds you of being on vacation, and 
5. Art is expensive, but putting up your own pictures is really cheap; you can get a decent frame for less than $20 and print for a few bucks at most.

So I've been meaning to put up some additional pics at home for a while. The reason this project has taken so long to do was because all of my pictures were on an old computer. I finally got around to turning it on, and discovered that it could no longer connect to the internet (no emailing or uploading) and we had no hardware to get the pics off. After a bit of poking around and getting annoyed, I finally ran over to the nearest office store to get a really big thumb drive, and moved all the pics over to my new computer. (lesson learned- move everything as soon as you get new technology).

Then it was as easy as picking my favorites, doing a little cropping and retouching, and uploading them to cvs to print. I grabbed a couple new frames from Target- I really like theirs because they are simple and make it feel like a gallery. Then it was a quick project to pop in the new pictures, hammer in some hangers, and stick them on the wall. The limitation of our local cvs store is that it only prints as big as 8x10 - which is why we have quite a few of that sized frame around the house. I tend to group by color.

new black and white group of cool carved things from our trips to Cambodia & Spain in the living room

it's nice when the art covers the same distance as the thing below it- but this just makes the couch look crappy.

a blue-themed group in the entryway featuring:

 Grandpa's picture of Greenland, my brother's picture of Namibia, and mine of Norway.

Go family, go!

two new pics in the dining room from a trip with my mom to Mexico

a new one for the fireplace room from Spain

and another for the fireplace room from Italy. 

closeup of the fireplace room and my grandfather's belt buckle

 

 

So- maybe that's enough travel pics for now. But I'm generally pleased with the new stuff up on the walls. It's a small project, but it makes a big difference. Combined with the plants and new lights, the first floor is really feeling a lot nicer, and a lot more like ours. If only we could do something about the basement and the kitchen...