April 15, 2013 / JustinKays Porter

Deck the Halls

I know, it’s not Christmas. Or anywhere near the holiday season! But the blustery weather today had me feeling wintery, and the song reference is just too appropriate! Read on to find out how we decked the halls (or, in less holiday-inspired terminology, how we dressed up our boring hallway with some hand-made details and memories in the form of photos).

In our old apartment, we had a long shotgun hallway that ran the entire length of the apartment. When we first moved in, we decided that we were going to hang photos all along one side of the hallway from our trip to Thailand and Laos. So we bought black frames from Ikea and printed out the photos we wanted to use. Then we argued for months over the best way to arrange the frames on the wall! I kid you not. It took us forever to come up with an arrangement we both liked for this gallery wall. But when we finally did, we both loved it and lots of our visitors also loved it.

When we moved into our new house, we wanted to create a similar hallway but without all the heartache. We couldn’t use the same configuration we had in the apartment because the new hallway is much shorter (which I am NOT complaining about at all!). Instead, we decided to design and install rails down the hallway for our frames to sit in. This eliminated the trouble of getting all the frames level, getting the frames to look cohesive, and agreeing on a frame layout. You see, as long as the rails are level, you’re good to go. And you can change the frame arrangement anytime you like!

Boring hallway. Even though it has beautiful floors, baseboard, trim, and paint, it needed a little excitement!

We bought pine boards and moulding for this project, and decided to stain them with an espresso finish. We went with espresso for a few reasons: 1) we love coffee (I know, totally irrelevant; but still…), 2) we wanted something on the darker side so that the black frames wouldn’t stand out too much against the rails, and 3) we wanted a dark stain so it would pop off the walls, metaphorically speaking, and scream: look at me! Look at me! We think the rails achieved all of these things. Don’t you?

Photo rails installed! Sorry for the lack of photos… while writing this post I realized we didn’t take a single picture of the construction or installation process. Oops!