I had such great plans to decorate our house before we moved in but they’ve all have fallen to the wayside and the only thing I’ve managed to really get into has been the garden and the indoor plants. So I am committing to doing a bit of decor each month, like eating an elephant piece by piece. The first project is a diy gallery wall in the dining room area. This was just an easy and cheap project and in this post I’ll tell you how I achieved it.

Inspo
Once I decided to do the diy gallery wall, I trawled Pinterest looking for inspiration and settled on doing a minimalistic black and white theme. I can always add to it at a later stage

Putting it up
This was the part that gave me the most anxiety because I wanted to make sure that I do it right the first time. I also needed to ensure that the placement was right. I cut out paper to the size of the frame, taped that onto the wall and used it as dummies. This way I could change up the orientation, the placement and the spacing until I found what worked for me. I marked where I should hammer the hooks while the dummies were up just to make it easier. I 100% recommend this method.

Material and cost
I wanted this to be as cheap as possible and because I knew I wanted a monochrome theme, I decided to get simple black frames

• Frames R32 each at Osman’s, you can also get them at China Mall or The Crazy Store
• Hooks R28 from the hardware store
• Printing R0 – I printed on our home printer, you can print at work (don’t quote me on this one) or at your local print shop for approx R2/page
• Images and fonts R0 – all were from free sources on the internet. The font I used for the lettering is this one. The imagesare from Unsplash: this one, this one and this one.

The total for this diy gallery wall was R220! Not bad at all!