Living Room Gallery Wall

Hi! How was everyone's weekend? I started playing around with a layout for the "gallery wall" I want to do in our living room. This is the fourth wall in our living room, the one I didn't show you originally when I posted about this room. Gee, I wonder why?

Ooops. It has nothing on it (except four switch plates!). No furniture, no artwork. Its a slightly weird space. This is the "walkway" to get from the kitchen (that doorway on the left) to the family room (doorway to the right). The main part of the living room, where the fireplace, sofa, coffee table and chairs are is off to the side, pretty much where I'm standing to take this pic. It's large enough that it could have some sort of function...or a sideboard or bookcases or a secretary, something. But I'm not sure what yet. And to be honest, this whole room is pretty temporary (not that that is a reason to do nothing with it)...I'm assuming that once we have kids, the family room and living room are going to have to be rethought to accommodate are growing/changing needs.

But anyways...in the meantime...I have a huge blank wall with nothing on it and I have a ton of stuff/frames in the basement that I'm not doing anything with. Instant gallery wall. I hope. So I got out the main pieces I wanted to use (some paintings I've done, a cross-stitch my grandmother made for me, a wedding gift of both of our coat of arms) and started messing around with them, filling in the extra space with any random frames or prints I had lying around.

Luckily, the floor in front of this wall is completely open, so I was able to just lay out the frames right here on the ground in front of the wall. This helped me know how wide to make the gigantic invisible rectangle that all the smaller frames will fit inside of (I'd like for the most part for all the frames in the bottom row to be aligned on the bottom, frames in the top row aligned on the top, frames in the left column to be aligned on the left, etc.) I measured the usable vertical space on the wall and then laid my tape measure down on the ground (locked right after the height measurement I wanted) to know how tall to build my layout.

From there I just played around with the composition and placement of everything. Alot of these frames contain artwork that I'm not going to use (it just happened to be in the frame already, or I liked it when we bought it but not anymore) so once I have everything hung in the correct spots, I'll swap out what's inside for new artwork I really like. I'm also considering painting some of the frame molding if I don't think the color works for this room (like that random blue frame on the bottom right - that's my grandma's cross-stitch). For now I'm just worried about getting the sizes and shapes of the frames in the right spot. I think I'm liking the arrangement below. Although its still sitting on the floor like this (thanks for not stepping on any of them, Paul!) so it could change. Any thoughts?

Ps. For a beautiful gallery wall and great tutorial on how to hang one, check out this recent post of Mrs. Limestone's.

Pps. Do any of you have gallery walls?