Print Walls Are Hard

Having spent the past two and a half years renovating our house (and, ahem, still not finishing it), it's nice to finally be at the stage where we can do some of the nicer stuff, the stuff you can do without getting covered in dust/paint/plaster and that you can do at leisure without worrying that if you don't get it finished, you'll be left without a toilet for the night. (Renovating a house is SO much fun guys).

Despite the fact that we still have a completely blank canvas of a hallway, recently we seem to be turning our hands to the finishing touches in other rooms, which is much more enjoyable, although surprisingly difficult. Whereas I've had no problem at all with knocking entire walls down, it would seem I'm a little bit more apprehensive about putting nails in newly decorated walls because what if I put one in the wrong place and then you can see it and I can't cover it up and I've ruined our house forever?! (Dramatic, me?)

Anyway, in this post I'd like to talk about print walls, specifically how bloomin' difficult they are to create. This is partly my own fault because when I say 'print wall' I actually mean 'everything you could possibly put up on a wall wall', but it doesn't quite have the same ring to it and would definitely have made the title of this post far too long. So I'm going to chat through how I did create the print wall in our living room along with a few tips that you can take or leave because I'm sure everyone does these things differently (I'm so helpful right?).

T H E  T H E M E  |  I decided a long time ago that I wanted a plant themed wall somewhere in our house (surprise surprise) and when we settled on a dark green for our living room walls, it seemed a no-brainer that it should be in there. I don't at all think you need a theme for a print wall, you can totally just put up a load of prints that you like, but it definitely helped me in terms of planning it, plus it gives the living room a bit more of an aesthetic.

T H E  P R I N T S  |  I use the term 'prints' loosely because you can put whatever you want up there; photographs, a mirror, a clock, but the next step is deciding what you want on the wall. Decide whether you just want prints or a mixture of things, then smaller details like whether you want all the frames to match or not. You might want all the prints to be the same size so you can do something a bit more uniform or you might want a complete jumble of everything (like me).

T H E  P L A C E M E N T  |  Now this is the difficult bit. I vaguely planned out where I maybe wanted things to be in relation to each other, but it's SO hard to picture what something will look like on the wall when it's actually on the floor. In the end, I chose what I wanted to be the focal point of the wall and worked outwards from there. The 'stay wild' print from Maggs London was chosen as my focal point, as it was the first print I bought with the intention of making a print wall and it's relatively big. I also knew that I wanted my little hanging plant on a shelf to be in the right hand corner so I popped that up, then I realised it would look nice if the mirror reflected the greenery from some angles so that went up too and in that vein I began building it up. I didn't want it to look too uniform or cluttered so it did take me a while to commit to each nail going in!

S T A R T  S M A L L  |  I don't think my print wall is necessarily finished, but I didn't want to put too much into it and then regret it. I love it how it is, but at the moment I've got the bare minimum on there so I can add to it in time if I want to. Much better that way round than decide I want to take something down in a couple of months!

Do you have a print wall?

Amy x