Living Room Photo Collage

I have been on a mission to get my living room decorated.  I love the look of photo collages hanging up, with mismatched frames. 

I also knew I wanted to tie in more blue, green, and white to brighten up the newly painted beige walls and the brown couches. 

So, I took a quick trip to the craft store where I found some pretty scrapbook paper, and decided I liked having the letter "M" around as well, since that's what our last name starts with. 

I shopped the house for frames that weren't really being used, and sat down on the floor to play around with layouts that might work.  I settled on one and then got to work painting my frames.  I did most of them with a quick coat of white spray paint.  They are NOT perfect, as I was going for a bit of a shabby chic look. 

I decided to paint the glass in the biggest frame with chalkboard paint, as well as the glass in a smaller frame.  I was thinking of doing the "M" Family, and "Est. 2004."  Love the way it turned out!

So, I knew it was going to be tricky to hang up all of these frames without poking a million holes in my newly painted wall...and I really didn't want that.  So, Pinterest to the rescue!  Found a great tip that was originally posted at Blissfully Domestic. 

I took an old roll of wrapping paper and traced everything!

I made sure to write which frames I had traced since some are similar sizes and I wanted them if specific places.  I poked in the holes where the nails would go on the frames too.

Then I got to work putting the traced papers up on my wall with some easily removable tape. I put all the nails in right through the paper once I got everything where I wanted it, then just pulled the paper off the wall right before I put the frame up! So easy! 

My helper is pretty cute, huh? :o)

Almost done!  My last touch was to change out all of the pictures in the frames to sepia toned photos of our family!  I absolutely LOVE how it turned out! 

And there is my "finished" (when is it ever REALLY finished?!) product! 

Also, who knew how hard it would be to find white chalk?!  I looked all over, Walmart, drugstores, grocery stores...I found plenty of colored chalk, but no boxes of just white chalk.  I finally found a box of sidewalk chalk that had a stick of white in it (which I really like, actually, because the tip is "sharpened" like a crayon, haha, really nice to use!).  I want to get some chalk markers, but I was too impatient to wait for them if I ordered them from Amazon or somewhere else online.