My husband is the sentimental one in our relationship and he’s always asking for more pictures around our house. So I’ve been trying to make an intentional point to add more framed photos and albums throughout the house. Over the past year and a half we’ve been working on transforming our unfinished basement into a fun place for the family to gather and watch movies and play games together. It’s a pretty large room which means when you’re implementing decor and things you have to be very intentional that it’s to scale. You can’t add small or medium size frames to a large wall.
Since we just had new family photos taken I thought it could be a nice touch to add a large photo of each of our girls behind the sofa. I knew something like this could easily escalate in price quickly so I did a bit of research and found a great way to DIY some large scale family photos.
These are the black frames I purchased for our basement. They also have this white framed option that’s nice. Or this gold one that I purchased for a friend that is beautiful, and an aged gray. They each come in a few different size options which is helpful for finding the right one for your space. I did some measuring and determined that the 20 x 28 inch frame would be the right size for our basement, costing me $13 each.
After I selected my frame I went to Walmart online and ordered my photos. When you order a photo this large they are printed on a type of poster paper. I was still able to get my photos the same day which was awesome. I selected the 12 x 18 size poster print which cost about $10 a piece. The people at the Walmart photo center were so helpful. I had no idea I could order a photo this large so easily and at such a great price.
Once I had both my frame and my photos I took them to Hobby Lobby to pick up mats. You could opt not to put mats in your frames, but they ended up being the least expensive part of this DIY and I think they are the reason the photos turned out so good! The mats are what fool you into thinking that these frames cost more than they actually do. You may be able to find pre-cut frames to fit your frame size, I’ve had good luck with that in the past. But for this project they didn’t have the right size.
So I went to the framing department at Hobby Lobby and selected a white mat I liked. Hobby Lobby has over three hundred mat boards to choose from, including colored, textured, and fabric.(I used one of their fabric mat boards on another project I’ll share with you later.) They cut them to order for me that day while I waited. They just needed to measure my frame and my picture size, easy as that. I will note here that I wish they would have cut inside my mats a little smaller. When I went to assemble them there was very minimal overhang where my mat lay over my photo so it was a little tricky. But I got them assembled without any issue and you can’t even tell. The total cost at Hobby Lobby was about $5 per mat, which I thought was a great deal.
Like I mentioned, I did all the assembling of these pictures myself. You can opt to have Hobby Lobby assemble them for you, but that will be an extra cost, and I was looking to make this project as minimal cost as possible. So my finished project ended up costing a total of $28 a piece! I did a little research and if I would have opted for a wood frame this could have cost me closer to $65 per frame! That still doesn’t include the mat and photo. I couldn’t be more happy with how this turned out. And based on the tears in my husband’s eyes I’d say he’s happy with the result as well.
Because I was hanging these on concrete walls I felt like I had to get a little creative with how I was going to hang them. Drilling into the walls was an option, but not one I was interested in. Command strips were another option I considered, but I felt a bit hesitant. So I searched and ended up finding this double sided tape that was really thick. I had to cut it into pieces that were to the size of the back of the frame. I put five pieces along the top and five pieces down each side. This was a great option because our concrete walls aren’t level everywhere. This tape is nice and thick and helps me to make sure it’s sticking in most places.
Do you think this is a DIY that you could incorporate into your home? Tell me which room? I feel like the possibilities are endless.
