Photo Wall - DIY

How to make a photo wall

I found a similar photo wall on Pinterest and fell in love with this idea and knew I needed one for the wedding!!! I did a little bit of research but couldn’t find very many DIY blogs on how to make these… so I kinda made it up as I went along!!

Here is how Casey and I built our photo wall:

Step 1 – Casey bought a piece of plywood, a chair rail, yellow paint, gray paint and paint brushes (he also bought the stuff to make the base for it to stand up on its on but we haven’t built that part yet so I will blog how to do that later). My mom bought us a frame and I found the other one at Goodwill.

Step 2 – I painted the bottom half yellow. I read online how high to put a chair rail and most people said 1/3 of the height of your wall. My “wall” /board was 8 feet tall so I went ahead and just did 3 feet high (lower than that kind of looked odd).

 Step 3 – I put the chair rail on the board and laid out frames how I wanted them. I traced the 2 bigger frames (from the inside) with a permanent marker.

 

Step 4 – I painted the top part gray… everything except for where I traced because we were just going to cut that out anyways.

 

Step 5 – I looked everywhere for a stencil that I liked and couldn’t find anything… then as I was leaving the last store I was at, I found a chalk board in a fun shape and figured I would just trace that over and over and over again to make my own design. I traced it with a permanent marker and then went over it with white paint to make it pop (had to do 2-3 coats). The reason I left the cutting until later was because I wanted to make sure I could get my design on the “wall” perfectly, with the holes being cut out, that would have been a bit harder.

 

Step 6 – Find a sexy man and have him cut out your squares for you… the sexy man part was easy, finding a jigsaw was a bitter harder. I finally found one from a friends Dad (thanks Dale!) Then you will need to get some glue (we used Nail Glue from Home Depot and a Caulk gun) and glue down the frames and chair rail. We ended up putting a a couple of heavy boxes on top of each of the frames so make sure and have a good bond… then leave it overnight to dry.

 

Step 7 – Set the board up and place a REALLY cute kid behind it and stand back and admire your work!!

 

Step 8 – Make a base… to be continued!!