Second Time's a Charm

We finally finished unpacking and organizing this weekend, which means that it was time to hang some pictures. We have A LOT of pictures. With the expansive walls of our old apartment, we used lots of pictures and groups of frames. The wall space in this apartment is a lot more broken up with windows, archways, and built-ins so we will likely be retiring many of our pictures and only displaying the ones we love. Anyway, I've been wanting to to an asymmetrical frame arrangement above our bed for awhile now and this weekend I had a chance to do this project. Since we already owned all the pictures and frames, the total cost of this project was $0!
First I looked through our piles of frames and selected the ones I wanted for the bedroom. I knew that I wanted to keep with a white/blue/green theme so that it didn't get to overwhelming and chaotic.
Next, I laid out the pictures that I wanted on our entryway rug. I played around with the arrangement and found one that I liked the best.

After that, I measured the rug (4x6) and used painters tape to tape the same size rectangle above our bed. (which was a little tricky since I'm a shorty and Nick wasn't home- but I managed). I left some space near the bottom because we are taking about making a low headboard for our bed sometime in the future. 

Then I measured 3 ft in and 17 in down to the place where I wanted to hang the mirror. Since the mirror is the center of the arrangement, I wanted to make sure these measurements were accurate. 

I worked from the center out to the edges, using the mirror as a reference point for hanging all the other objects. I did not measure everything else as precisely, although I referred to my pictures and followed the arrangement pretty closely. After each placement, I took everything off the wall so the pictures wouldn't fall as I was hammering. 

I made a few minor adjustments and ended up not using one of the pictures but it turned out very similar to my beginning arrangement. 

I used a level to make sure everything was straight and balanced (and made a mental note of the few things I wanted Nick to check- mainly those shelves and the letter R).  Then I took the tape off: 

Just pray we're not in bed during the Bay Area's next big earthquake....

Okay, after I made that joke, I actually did start freaking out about being in an earthquake and having tons of pictures and glass falling on our heads. So, I decided to take everything off the wall and move my arrangement to the opposite wall. Sigh. Better to be safe than sorry, I suppose.
In the process of moving things to a new wall, I decided that while I liked the arrangement, it was a tad too busy for my taste and I wanted to only use white frames this time.
So, to make a long story short, I followed the same process of laying my pictures on the rug, taping off an area and hammering, leveling, and hanging everything.

Aaaand, here's the finished result:

It's much simpler than the first arrangement but it has room to grow!
We left the mirror above our bed and reinforced it with many command strips, so hopefully it's not going anywhere.
So, that's how to hang an asymmetrical picture gallery. Twice.