Our Family Wall.

We keep framed (semi)current portraits of our 10 children on one wall in the living room.  Until recently, the frames were a mismatched hodge podge of whatever frames I had available. I've been saying for years that I'd like to replace them all at once with 10 matching frames, plus another frame for an 8x10 of the whole family.

This year, somebody finally listened. :)

Jeremy, Sarah's beau, presented us with an even dozen of matching picture frames for Christmas!  (I suspect the mismatched frames offended his perfectionist engineering sensibilities even more than they bothered me).

The week of Christmas was exhausting, and every day in the first week of January I wanted to tackle the frame replacement project, but I was too busy.  Then I decided that today, Saturday, January 10, it was going to happen.

I set them up in three rows:  the three youngest girls centered in the top row, all four boys centered in the middle row, and the three oldest girls centered in the bottom row.  It SEEMS as though all I have to do is lay out the top three pictures, measure the distance from Regina's picture-hanger to Noelle's, then make a level line and hang all three pictures a few inches from the ceiling.  Then do the same for the four boys and hang them, staggered below and between the top row's pictures.  Finally hang the remaining three bottom pictures directly below the top three.  It works on paper.

The first problem is that the wood stove was blazing, and there was all heat and no oxygen to breathe up by the ceiling.   The second problem is that the ceiling is uneven - DRAMATICALLY uneven.  Then there's those pieces of molding that cut the wall into uneven sections.  No matter how perfectly I measured, the optical illusions of unevenness created by the ceiling and the wall made it look crooked.

As an added bonus, I dropped every tool I touched every time I touched it, and Philip was on the loose so he kept going after all the framed pictures and every tool I set down.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I also have a cold and my stuffy head and runny nose just exacerbated the misery.

In the end, I ended up just eyeballing the whole thing and moving nail after nail after nail until they satisfied my aesthetic sensibilities.

It only took an hour-and-a-half, but it was the longest hour-and-a-half of my life.


There you go, Jeremy and Sarah.  I don't know whether to thank you or curse the days you were born!

Just kidding. It looks great.  I love you both.

But if either of you comes here and points out something that's a little bit off, I'm probably going to snap.