An art gallery

I finally accomplished a project that I have been planning for well over a year. I actually bought some of the supplies just before we moved into this house last year but they've been sitting around waiting for the art room to be ready.

Have I explained the 'art room' ever? It's technically meant to be the formal dining room in our house but the dining area in the kitchen is so large that I can't ever see a need to have a formal dining space. Partly because I'm lazy and don't want to drag my food all over creation just to eat in a fancy room. Partly because we are too large of a family to have two rooms for the same purpose. That's just silly. I currently have two full size dining tables in the kitchen with room for stools at the counter and the girls' backpacks hanging. There's no need for a whole other room. There is obviously a need for me to build a larger dining table to remedy the two tables situation but that's going to require me to wake up in the mood to build a table. Hasn't happened yet folks. Someday. I have the building plans pinned so it will happen. I should probably build a bed for the child who sleeps on a mattress on the floor first. I have priorities.

So we have what we call the art room. Others might see it more as a craft room. It's where we keep my sewing table and supplies which doubles as my desk for filing, the kids' easel, their coloring and art supplies, a couch for reading, and the toy box/ottoman that was never being utilized in the living room. I figure what better thing to put on the wall in the art room than an art gallery.

 I'll link to my inspiration post below in case you want another take on the project but the short and simple is that I bought the clipboards in a set of 24, used a tape measure and level, tried hanging them by nails and realized that was not going to work, then I hung them all using 3M picture Velcro thingies.

I started with just the clipboards to the right of the thermostat but quickly realized that it looked silly and totally unbalanced so I decided to cover the whole wall.

I love this art gallery! There are plenty of spots for all four girls to hang their works and I can very easily rotate things out as they present me with new work. My older girls go to an arts magnate school so I get to change out the art quite often even when I'm being picky about what I put up. You'll also see that I put up a few snapshots of the kids at first as fillers but those will probably get replaced with original art soon.

How do you display scribbles in your home? Do you have any simple projects that have been sitting around for a year waiting for something to fall together? I needed to paint the art room before I could put up the clipboards. Before I could paint I had to find the budget to buy paint. Before I could check the budget for paint I had to remove the hideous wallpaper border that was gracing this room. If you give a mouse a cookie amiright?

I've been busy working on other things around the house so hopefully I'll be back soon to share some of those updates. It just always seems like I have to do 90 things before I can go back and finish the first item and obviously I can't just clean everything up and put my tools away if I'm still in the middle of a project. Even if I'm in the middle of twelve projects and don't finish any of them for several months. My poor poor husband.

Inspiration here: Baby Rabies