Four Square

An ever-popular game at Youth Group… but not the kind of four square we’re talking about today! Our Family Room has gone through the decorating ringer as we’ve experimented with color, layout, and curtains. Finally, we reached a happy place and are loving the light and airy space, with all those hints of blues and greens. I’ll tell you what- midday weekends naps are a thing of beauty now!

Ready for the newest addition?

Can you spot it? Over-helpful Hint: It’s the frames to the right.  We really have two spaces to fill- one on either side of the fireplace. The thought is that the left side will be home to a gallery display of four square frames, while the right will sport a single, larger print. While the latter part of this is still yet to be determined, we are cruising right along with our gallery set-up. This display has actually been up for a few months now, but we’ve been doing the “let’s leave it up and see how we like it” dance while we decide if this is the right thing for the space.We took a few simple steps to get the frames up and hangin’ purty:

Step #1: Lay them out on the floor to figure out spacing and placement. This was helpful because it allowed us to play around with the layout before making any commitments in the way of nail holes in the wall. Once we worked out the arrangement (four squares making one larger square) and the spacing between frames (5″), we were all set to get crackin’ on the real deal.

Step #2: Find the center mark on the wall. Until then, our fireplace had not been centered on the wall. We measured and moved it to be equidistant from both sides of the room. From there, we used the center marking to figure out where the left side display would fall. Essentially, we divided the wall into four columns, finding the center line down the middle and then the center of each side- this helped us to center our display within the space we were using. Really, I’m just trying to see how many times I can use the word center. Centercentercentercentercenter. There.

Step #3: Transfer to the wall. There are all different types of tricks for doing this (ex. using painter’s tape and paper to create a mock version before puncturing the wall), but I tend to be too impatient and just want to use the ‘ole “you hold it and I’ll stand back and eyeball it” method. Which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. This time around, we got the spacing between the frames okay, but weren’t sure about the distance between the bottom of the frames and the armchair.

Too high?? Enter the two months that we left it like this to deliberate… which leads us to:

Step #4: Make tweaks if necessary. In the end, we’re still deciding whether or not to move the whole display down about six inches, to make it more cohesive with the furniture and less “floating high up on the wall”. But this is where she sits today. We’re loving what the frames add to the room and how the display draws your eye over to that corner of the space, in turn, helping you to focus on the natural light from the window. All that’s left to do is…

Step 5: Fill them! I chose plants, to echo our “bring green inside” movement. A bit of magazine hunting and Google searching landed me with some great shots of succulents and another green spiky plant, much like the actual one that lives on the coffee table.All I did was choose a print that I liked, cut it to size, and popped it in two of the frames. For the other two, I went a different route. I grabbed a pack of lime green (although they photograph really yellow for some reason) cloth napkins from the dollar bin at Michaels and used them to add a shot of bright color to the foursome.

This process was similar to the photos- with the exception of ironing the fabric before framing to avoid as much creasing as possible.

I arranged the frames so that the fabric and the photos hung diagonally from each other to create a balanced, but not totally symmetrical display. Now that we have this side the wall finished, it’s time to tackle the other! Someday. For now, we like this…times four. 🙂

-Leslie