{Creating a Gallery Wall with Shutterfly's New Design-A-Wall Tool}

This post is part of a sponsored campaign with Shutterfly, but all opinions are 100% mine. Hey, y'all!  I have a really awesome makeover to share with you today.  

My mom has been begging asking me to makeover her kitchen/dining room for months.  I kept brushing her off until I was given an opportunity to review some product for the awesome folks at Shutterfly utilizing their new Design-a-Wall Tool.  Their product was just the inspiration I needed to get started on the kitchen/dining room makeover.  Painting and creating a focal wall in the dining room was such a great starting point to help me get motivated to do the rest of the room, which I'll share with you in weeks to come.  Without further adieu, let's look at the wall that really didn't have a focus to begin with.

This room was decorated in 2002 when my family and I moved into the house, and it's stayed the same since then.  The room is nice, don't get me wrong; it just needs to be modernized.  The first steps were removing the chair rail and painting the walls.  We choose a gray blue color.  (I'll talk more about the wall color when I do a full room reveal.) While all the taping, rolling, cutting in, and drying was going on, I worked on creating the art for the feature wall.  That's where Shutterfly was invaluable.

Their new tool called Design-A-Wall made creating a gallery for the wall super easy.  When designing the wall, I had the option to choose canvas, framed canvas, metal, wood, or acrylic prints.

I chose to create a canvas photo gallery in the Step & Repeat Five Right arrangement.  All I had to do was upload my photos and place them where I wanted them to go.  I chose different layouts for some of my canvases, added text to one, and used a printable I created for one of the canvases.  (I'll be giving you the printable for free further in the post!)  Once I perfected my design and layout, I saved my project and ordered the canvas print grouping, which comes with a free hanging kit.  The boxes started arriving very quickly!

It's so exciting to get boxes in the mail that you know contain something awesome!  The canvases that I had personalized looked awesome, but there was something else in the boxes that was just as awesome (if not more) than the canvases!

It was the Design-A-Wall Hanging Kit. Y'all!  If you've ever tried to hang a gallery wall, you know how annoying the process can be.  You have to measure and level, and you don't really know if you'll like a piece of art where you hang it until it's hung, and then what if you don't like the placement?  You have a hole in the wall to repair.  That's where this awesome tool came in SUPER handy.  It's like magic.  FOR REAL.  And the best part about it?  Like I said earlier, the hanging kit is FREE.

A level comes in the kit along with the wall template.  The wall template is so cool because it is to scale, meaning that it's the exact size of your arrangement.  You stick the level to the wall template once you unroll the template.  The level ensures that you don't hang the template crooked.  Then it's time to decide on placement.

Do you see those gray rectangles?  The are the exact size and arrangement of the canvases I ordered!  I could tell the exact spot where I wanted to hang the canvases without having to put a bajillion nail holes in the wall.  Once my lovely assistants--mom and dad--held up the template so I could decide on placement, we taped the template down with painters tape.

Now you're probably wondering how you nail with the template on the wall.  There are easy directions to follow on the bottom of the template.  According to the type of art you order--remember, you can order more than just canvases--there are marks where you should make a tiny hole through the paper.

See the "+A"?  That's where the nail needed to go for our canvases.

My dad lightly punched a nail through the "+" enough to make a hole through the paper and an indention on the wall.  Then we removed the paper, and dad hammered nails in all the indentions he made.

Before we could hang the canvases, we had to attach the metal hooks to them that came in the packages.  That was easy to do with a tape measure and a hammer.

Then we hung the canvases in their "assigned" spot and used a level just to make sure they were straight.  The entire process from the hanging of the template to the leveling of the canvases took less than twenty minutes.   Once the canvas gallery was hung, it was time for me to do some magic.  Decorating magic that is.  We placed a pretty hutch bottom I refinished under the gallery.  (Don't worry.  I'll do a post about refinishing the hutch bottom soon.)  I added some accessories to the hutch top, and my mom's dreams of a redecorated room--at least this wall--were complete!

Isn't it pretty?  Let me show you the awesome canvases up close.

The one on the bottom of the arrangement is my favorite!

The 8x10 with the six small pictures actually contains some pictures that I downloaded from Facebook or downloaded from my phone.  I couldn't believe how good they looked on the canvas.

This one?  It's pretty darn huge: 16"x 20".  When I opened it, I told my mom that she better like my sister and I a whole lot because she is going to have to look at these big pictures of us all the time.

I love the family photo and the canvas of the printable I created.  And guess what?  You can download the printable to use for your own gallery wall!  Because I love you, I'm giving it to you for free.  You can download it HERE.

I added a few accessories to the top of the hutch bottom.  They're all different textures, patterns, and finishes to add some interest.

A spray painted thrift store lamp is the perfect size to fit under the right side of the canvas grouping.

I have to say that this wall that was once just okay is now such a pretty feature in the dining room.  

It all started with the awesome canvas gallery wall from Shutterfly and was made so easy with their new Design-A-Wall Tool.  (Thanks, Shutterfly!!!)  My mom is thrilled with her new focal wall, and she's so ready for me to finish the entire room makeover! If you want to create a personalized photo gallery wall and be able to hang the entire thing in less than twenty minutes, you definitely should visit Shutterfly's Design-A-Wall Page to get started on some redecorating yourself.