Our Growing Family Photo Wall Through the Years

A month or two ago I shared a glimpse on Instagram of our hallway family photo wall, and my direct messages went b-a-n-a-n-a-s! I was flooded with messages of ambitious viewers ready to replicate the idea in their own homes that very weekend, which were all so fun to read! (PS: If you ended up creating something similar, please DM me a picture, if you’d like! I’d love to see and share!)

I was initially taken back by the wave of overly positive reactions because I’m not sure I would call this idea unique or ground breaking, but I think this photo collage is a relatable idea because it’s fast, inexpensive, and sentimental, all things that typically make something a winner.

Our Family Photo Wall

In our new home, we have a long-ish hallway off of our kitchen and dining room that leads to our garage and laundry room. I decided to use this good chunk of space for our annual family photo wall. Originally started in Kansas, the idea is simple: add one family photo to the wall each fall/winter. That’s it!

Frames for a family photo wall

For this project, I ordered a few Tiny Mighty Frames from Amazon. The frame is 8×8 and the white mat leaves a 4×4 picture opening. I figure that once they’re discontinued down the road, I’ll be able to easily find a similar white frame and matting. I also dabbled with the idea of ordering 20+ more frames so that I’ll have them ready to go for the next few decades, but I’m stubborn and not super interested in storing all of them.

Though purchasing them all at once would surely make this project much more maintainable and easy, buying dozens of frames at once takes this project from cheap and affordable to somewhat pricey. For now, I like inexpensive. 😉

Prints for a family photo wall

I always use Walgreens.com’s online picture ordering system to order a 4×4 print to pick up. Easy!

I tape the print to the mat, write the month and date on the mat, and then add it to our display. Watching our family grow is thrilling to me, and I think it’ll be equally thrilling for the girls. I hope to soon involve them in picking out our annual picture.

If you’re curious where our next frame will go, it’ll be right here. I’ve run out of room at the end of the hallway, so I’ll start  a new row at the end of the year, and then in the coming years will continue shifting them to the left.

Growing up, we took frequent church directory pictures, and my parents would always purchase, frame, and display one really big one of our family. By high school, we had four or five around our home, and I always thought it was fun to see our family grow from just me, to adding my sister, to then adding my brother. I was also neat to watch how we grew from one church directory picture to the next.

I hope this inspires you to do something similar to visually track just how fast time flies and to maybe treasure your current season of life just a bit more. I know personally that this wall is a daily reminder of just how quickly our not-so-baby girls are growing literally right in front of our eyes.

I have frames from both Tiny Mighty Frames as well as Frametory, and I would highly recommend both to get started on this project.

PS: Just for kicks and giggles, here is a post I wrote four years ago about creating my very first gallery wall.