Hang things on your walls with abandon.

People often tell me they don’t have anything on their walls because they’re afraid of getting it wrong.  Good news: if you get it wrong, you can redo it!  Hanging things on your walls is one of the fastest and easiest ways to upgrade your space and ensure a room feels thoughtfully completed. 

I learned how to hang a solid gallery wall not because I was trying to; I’d hang things on my wall of my first apartments, feel like something was off, and then just move things around to cover the original nail hole or add something to create better balance if it felt like I’d hung something too high or low or too far to one side or the other.  The walls of my earliest apartments were riddled with nail holes but you’d never know it because I just hung more pieces to cover them.  (Thank goodness for the old toothpaste-in-nail-holes trick when it was time to move out.)

Get some things that will make you happy to see on your walls — inexpensive art prints, blow up your kids’ artwork, pictures of your favorite places, postcards from loved ones, ticket stubs from a concert you saw back in the day.

Then you need to frame whatever you’re going to hang on the wall. 

People generally hang their art too high; you want it to be at eye level.  The standard rule that galleries use when hanging art is positioning the artwork's center 57 inches from the ground to match average eye level.  Here’s a helpful write-up on how to hang at the right height.

You want hang your art even lower if you’re hanging it above a piece of furniture or mantle; in those cases, you want the art’s positioning to flow nicely with the furniture or mantle, and the best way to do that is to hang your art 6-12 inches above the furniture.  In the case of a mantle, I often hang art so the bottom of the frame is only 2-4 inches above the surface of the mantle.

And when hanging multiple piece together, you want to group them in a way that essentially creates one larger piece rather than hanging them spaced far apart.  I often hang clusters of several items together by leaving only 2-3 inches between each item.