Our Photo Ledges

I’ve been trying to be more purposeful about displaying photographs of family and friends around our house, along with some of those everyday shots that I just love. Something not quite as permanent as our other photos displays where I can swap out my favourites regularly.

I’m a clean and simple girl at heart and, as much as I love displaying photographs in our home, I didn’t want every flat surface cluttered up with picture frames. I played around with a few different ideas but ended up deciding on our photo ledges.

We’re not really DIY’ers so I searched around and found instructions here for how to build them.

We made the trip to Home Depot, sketch and measurements in hand, where thankfully they’ll cut everything to length so it fits nicely in our vehicle. Actually we made 2 trips, thanks to my attempt to be less wasteful.

I had determined the perfect length for each of our photo ledges to be 4’8″. Once we were at Home Depot and I saw the wood was sold in 8 foot lengths I talked myself into the fact that I’d be okay with the photo ledges being 4 feet long. Thankfully I decided to see how they’d look in the space before we started sanding, priming and paint. They were too small and I knew that it was going to drive me crazy. So back to Home Depot we went.

The silly thing is, I know better. One of the biggest mistakes families make when displaying photographs on the wall of their home is using frames that are too small. We’ve become used to 4″x6″ being a normal sized photograph and 8″x10″ being a big photograph when in fact an 8″x10″ photographs is way too small for most walls.

So, after our second trip to Home Depot and much sanding, priming and painting, our photo ledges were ready to be installed. My husband ended up screwing them right into the studs. With nothing on the ledges the screws are clearly visisble but I knew I was going to be filling them with frames so I wasn’t worried.

Currently I have (4) 8″x10″ frames, (5) 5″x7″ frames and 2 clear acrylic clipboards on display. The idea behind the clipboards is that each of my littles can display one of their school art projects at a time. We have a casual space so I’m cool with that, especially since it means we no longer have art randomly taped up to walls around our house.

I’m thinking I”ll add a small plant and perhaps a couple little chatchkes over the next couple weeks. The ledge is 4″ wide so I should have room for a small pot.

My plan is to swap out the photos regularly and perhaps even making it seasonal with photographs of my littles’ first Christmas’ at Christmas time and costumes from years past at Halloween.

I’m really happy with how they turned out!