The Library: Part 4 The Gallery Wall

I've always been an art lover and a firmly believe in supporting individual artists if at all possible rather than buying mass produced "art."  The trouble is that the real stuff can been extremely expensive and let's face it, the stuff you get from Amazon, Michael's, and Hobby Lobby is super cheap.  Ethically I don't like it; financially most of us can't swing authentic one of a kind oil paintings.  However, there is a work around.  A few years ago I started collecting vintage and antique prints as well as handmade paintings that I found at thrift stores, yard sales, and even inherited some very nice locally created antique oil paintings from a relative.  For the time being I just hung them on my wall to keep them out of storage and mushed them all together as best I could along with all the other things I'd been collecting for years, waiting to put into the home we were allegedly going to build one day.  This is how it looked before the renovations:

With all that in mind, I determined to save a large wall space in the library for displaying these pieces as a gallery.  Let's take a look at how it all began:

A very useful tip is to use paper to trace the shapes of the pieces you want to hang and tape them to the wall to get your arrangement just right before hammering nails into the wall.  I have used this method a number of times and it works extremely well.  However, for this wall, I really didn't want to put any unnecessary holes in it at all, so I opted for a gallery track instead.  This will allow me to change up the arrangement any time I want without need to use spackle and paint to cover all those holes.

The gallery track ended up being less of a life hack than I'd hoped.  This after waiting 6 weeks for Amazon to ship the wires because I don't have Prime.  The wires did scratch the wall in places and some of the paintings lean so far forward they pull everything on the wire forward with them.  If you want to remove a wire, you can't just unhook it, it has to slide all the way to the end to come out.  The hooks are very bulky and conspicuous, and I have a few other complaints as well, but I'll spare you the details.  It's not a perfect system and I have a few more paintings to go before I can call this done, but overall I am very happy with how it looks.  As always with my home renovation posts, to be continued...