While the boys were doing the grunt work, I was eyeing the expanse of wall space I needed to decorate. I have to admit, it was a little intimidating.
The room is a long narrow rectangle and there was a lot of real estate to cover. Have you ever hung a gallery wall in your house? Gallery walls are usually a collection of photos, artwork and other items hung kind of like a collage. They can be a symmetrical arrangement of same sized items, but often they are a mix of different sizes and shapes.
My plan for the Listening Room walls was a gallery wall of eclectic pieces – but on steroids.
Oh, and on a budget.
And without making the walls look like Swiss cheese.
I started out by browsing through my attic. I had a pretty good collection of stuff that been on display in my house at one time or another but didn’t make the cut the last time I redecorated. I hauled all of it over to the room, along with some odds and ends I found at thrift stores, plus clearance bargains from TJ Maxx and Marshalls. Overstock.com was a great resource. too.
For a few months, the stage was piled up with art, mirrors, and tchotchkes that I gradually worked into the arrangements.
I started out by anchoring the conversational areas with large pieces.
And gradually filled in the spaces with smaller pieces.
If I didn’t have the right thing at that moment, I left the spot empty – and sooner or later the right piece always presented itself.
My only parameters were my 1970’s color scheme – gold, brown, avocado and burnt orange – and I tried to repeat certain elements throughout the whole room to keep it cohesive.
It’s kind of like how you would design a long garden bed…repeating the same plants periodically keeps your border from looking like chaos.
Eventually, my giant game of artwork Tetris was finished and with the addition of some distressed oriental rugs, the conversational areas finally came together.
You can put almost anything into a gallery wall, so if you’re trying to do something like this on a budget, think outside the box. Aristotle said “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, and that saying is definitely true here.
Much like Fleetwood Mac and Van Halen, these items are fine on their own, but the alchemy happens when you combine them. Sometimes there is magic in the combination of disparate pieces.
Along with traditional prints (I stuck to vintage advertising images), I mixed in house numbers, cardboard numbers painted to look like metal, angel wings, macrame wall hangings, $6 clocks, mirrors of all sizes, candle holders and some photos my friend shot of a local musician’s guitar collection.
We lucked out and found an old black theater curtain on Craigslist for a couple hundred bucks too.
The curtain gives us a clean backdrop for the stage performances, absorbs sound, plus it covers up a small, oddly placed window. A track system from Amazon made the install easy, and miraculously it was a perfect size.
Unfortunately, we eventually found out from the fire marshall that we had to have it treated again to keep the anti-flammability coating up to date because they didn’t want “another Whitesnake episode“.
While nobody wants a horrific and deadly inferno at a live music performance, I’m fairly certain the acoustic singer-songwriters we are booking aren’t big into pyro. I could be wrong.
So, the (re)treatment added another $170 to the cost. It was still a decent find.
Just not a bargain anymore.
