245 - Refresh Your Walls with Me
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Show Notes:
We stare at the walls in our home every single day. Honestly, we just get used to them and we don’t think about what’s on them very much. Slowly, they become outdated or need a refresh. Old photos and artwork fill the walls of our home and we don’t love them like we used to. Today’s episode is meant to be a little boost for you and to remind you that the walls in your home are supposed to bring you joy. I am inviting you to refresh your walls with me.
For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.
Back when I still had Nancy Ray Photography, I bought this beautiful set of four custom frames. I loved them. They were so pretty. They were actually on display in my studio so I could showcase them to clients because we partnered with this frame company and we would sell this set of frames to some of my clients. I loved them so much. They were easy to put together yourself. They had a really high-end look to them. They were beautiful. Over time, they got dispersed and they lived in a lot of different places.
The first home they lived in was altogether as it should be, in the studio of Nancy Ray Photography that was in my townhouse. That was as we were growing this business. Then we loved locations, bought a new house, and had a new NRP studio set up. The frames kind of got split apart. Not literally, they didn’t break. It was a set of four. Two of them ended up in my main house and then two of them ended up in the studio, which was a stand-alone little building in my driveway. I would change the photos of them. Some would be personal photos and some would be more photography photos from my clients. Then we closed NRP and one of them stayed in the studio space with a picture of a chair and a bouquet on it. Another one, I put a pretty American flag artwork in it and kept it over there. We turned that space into an Airbnb studio apartment kind of thing.
Then out of the other two frames, one was hanging on the wall in our home and the other was under my bed collecting dust. Okay, stick with me. This story seems kind of trite and very dumb. I get it. Here’s my point. This set of frames has been my favorite. Over time, it has gotten lost and forgotten. Just recently, I really wanted to get it all back together and fill it with beautiful pictures that I actually love and that are updated with my family right now. It has taken me all summer to do this project, but I finally did it. I gathered all four frames and cleaned them off (I literally had to wipe off the dust and some stains on the front of the glass). I put them all together and now they’re on display in my mudroom/laundry room which is the place that we come in and out of all the time. I see it every single day and it brings me so much joy.
I told you that story because I know there is probably some sort of artwork or maybe a photo session that you had done of your family last spring that you’ve always wanted to print and put in frames in your house, but you never got around to it. Maybe you’re like me and you’ve added children to your family again, again, again, and your firstborn has so many pictures all over the house framed beautifully and then your third and fourth born have not so much because it’s just busy, you’re not thinking about it as much, and you just grow comfortable in your home.
The bottom line is I am here today to tell you, it can be done. It’s actually way bigger in our minds than it is in real life (to print those pictures and refresh the walls in your home). I printed brand-new pictures. I even did some artwork and hung those four beautiful frames for $20. I had to buy a little hardware kit on Amazon for a few dollars. Then I got a $10 photo printed at Walgreens. That’s not always what I recommend, but when you want to get something done, Walgreens is the way to go. They always have discount codes on photos and they do same-day printing. It’s pretty decent. I spent a few dollars on some calligraphy pens so that I wouldn’t have buy artwork. I just did it myself. Now, it has made me so happy.
Okay, so let that inspire you. Let’s take a minute to think about the walls in your home. You can focus on one area of your home that would bring you a lot of joy if it was refreshed. Or you can literally go from top to bottom and assess your entire house and make a whole gameplan. Today, I am going to give you an outline to do your whole house to get the creative thoughts flowing on how you can really refresh your home. I hope this is encouraging and inspiring to you.
Side note: This is part of the Legacy Photo System course where I encourage you to do this pretty regularly, but life happens. It’s hard to do this all the time. My encouragement for you today is to do it this week, this month, or at least get a gameplan going for it because it will bring you so much joy when it’s done.
So here’s what you do. This is what I teach in the course. Grab a blank sheet of paper, your favorite pen, a clipboard, a notebook, anything. Start at the top of your house (top floor). If you have a ranch-style house, start on one side and move across. If yo don’t, start and the top and go down. Now, you are going to set a timer. You don’t want this to take more than 15 minutes. This is not going to be an all-day thing. This is going to be a quick assessment of your house. The first thing that comes to mind when you see what you want to change. You’re going to go from the top to the bottom, asking yourself these questions:
Do I want to keep this frame?
Do I want to keep this photo in this frame?
Do I like this artwork that’s hanging here?
Do I like the place where it’s hanging?
What can be updated about this room?
You’ll kind of sit there and observe the room that you’re in for a few minutes. Write down the changes you want to make. You might even say, “I love this room. Maybe I just need to replace that 5x7 photo in that one frame and swap it out with a new one.” You would make notes for each room, hallway, or bathroom in your house. It might take you longer than 15 minutes, but I would encourage you, when the timer goes off, let that be it for that day. Let that be the work you do on it for that way and you can come back and set another timer on another day.
The bottom line is for you to take a quick assessment. I want you to keep moving. I don’t want you to get hung up in one room. You’re just asking, “What replacements do I need to make? What changes do I need to make?” Write down frames, notes, and the sizes of prints needed, and just make a plan. Then, after you do that, I want you to ask yourself, “What are recent images taken of our family that bring me so much joy?” It doesn’t always have to be the one of all of you smiling at the camera. Maybe it’s one that made you laugh really hard. Maybe it’s one that you took on your phone last week and it’s very imperfect, but it brings you a lot of joy. Those are the things that you should be looking at all the time. Those are the things you should print and put on the walls of your home.
Before I get to some practical resources on frames, where to get things printed, and how to do this, I want to share a quote with you that inspires the “why” behind this whole idea. Why in the world would I dedicate an entire podcast episode to this? Why is this important? This is a quote by Sally Clarkson, who is a precious, amazing woman and author. Her podcast is so encouraging if you’re looking for a mother figure to speak into your life and pour wisdom into you. She has written so many books, but the book that really is her signature book is called The Lifegiving Home. Here’s a quote from that book. It says,
“My parents understood that the world that they made within the walls of our house was what constituted home. So I grew up in spaces framed by art and color, filled with candlelight, marked by beauty. I grew up within a rhythm of time made sacred by family devotions in the morning and long conversations in the evening. I grew up with the sense of our daily life as a feast and delight; a soup-and-bread dinner by the fire, Celtic music lifting in the shadows, and the laughter of my siblings gave me a sense of the blessedness of love, of God’s life made tangible in the food and touch and air of our home.
It was a fight for my parents, I know. Every day was a battle to bring order to mess, peace to stressful situations, beauty to the chaos wrought by four young children. But that's the reality of incarnation as it invades a fallen world....What my parents-bless them-knew...is that to make a home right in the midst of the fallen world is to craft out a space of human flesh and existence in which eternity rises up in time, in which the kingdom comes, in which we may taste and see the goodness of God.”
Again, that is by Sally Clarkson in her book, The Lifegiving Home. I get teared up reading that to you because isn’t that what we want in our homes? For me, it feels quite crazy sometimes. I also am a mom of four and it can feel wild and very chaotic at times. What I love about this quote and how Sally explains how her parents lived and created this atmosphere in their home is that they were very intentional about the beauty that surrounded them. They were very intentional about how the spaces worked to point to something greater than themselves. They were very intentional about what they put on the walls of their home.
Of course, there is more to it than just what is hanging on our walls. That does not constitute the atmosphere in our home. What constitutes the atmosphere in our home is how we show up every day as parents and how we set the atmosphere. We also have authority over how our home serves us. We have authority over the walls in our home and how we can set an atmosphere to serve us well, to serve our children well, and to point to the beauty and goodness of our Creator on a daily basis.
That is why I wanted to encourage you. There is a practical side to it. Let’s get to assessing our home. What is outdated? How can we make this more beautiful and more of a space that brings us joy and points to goodness, color, art, life, and all of those rich things that we want to teach our children. It’s more than the practical side of things. There is so much to this and yet, there is a very practical side.
I know I am getting repetitive. I am going to share some practical resources, but I really wanted to drive the “why” behind this podcast episode. I hope this encourages you to know that your home is an important space. You get to choose what hangs on the walls of your home that points to the goodness and faithfulness of God.
There are so many beautiful resources out there for us. Even if you just frame pictures of your family, that is enough because family is such a blessing. Go back and listen to that quote. I am just talking and talking all around it now. That quote is so rich and so beautiful. I am so thankful for Sally Clarkson.
Let me share a couple of practical things. First, I love the quality of prints from Mpix.com. You can sign up for a professional photographer’s account because it is a professional print lab or you can sign up for a regular user account, which is great because most professional print labs only work with professional photographers (speaking from experience). If you know you’re going to place an order and you want some nice printed photos, try Mpix.com. It’s a great place. They will mail to you, but it will take a little while. If you want something quick, Walgreens and CVS are actually pretty good at printing very cheaply, very quickly. You can pick up same-day and I have done that numerous times as well.
There are plenty of nail-hanging or picture-hanging kits on Amazon if you need wire to hang things. I ordered a generic nail-hanging kit. Go look it up on Amazon. There are plenty of options to suit whatever you are looking for.
Where to get frames? That’s a question I get a lot. I love getting a lot of large frames from Ikea. If you want something affordable and quick, I have this set of six gold frames (I think they are 16x20) that hang in my kitchen. I get asked all the time on Instagram, “Where did you get those frames?” I got them from Ikea! I just bought six of them and I hung them up together. It’s great! They are not the highest quality. They are plexiglass; not real glass. Over time, I hope to upgrade them around my house, but honestly, it brings me peace of mind that I have plexiglass and not real glass in my home while my kids are little. I feel like they could knock them off the walls very easily.
If you do want nicer frames, our go-to is Framebridge. Oh my goodness. They will frame ANYTHING! Everything is custom. We have ordered several pictures for our home from anniversaries. Even a special poster we got from a concert that was signed. We had that matted and framed. A lot of the beautiful things in our home are from Framebridge. You have to send it in and then they do it custom. It is not cheap, but it is worth it because it is so nicely done.
Then, of course, there’s Target, HomeGoods. There is stuff nearby, within driving distance from you I’m sure, that is lovely. I just bought a few of the Magnolia frames from Target for our bedroom and a little bedroom refresh I’m doing. They are lovely.
Those are my go-to for updating the walls in your home. So I hope this encourages you just to do it. Last week’s episode was all about taking authority, according to the spiritual authority that the Lord has given us through Jesus. I know this may seem like such a weird connection to make. For me, when I take authority in my home over some things that I feel indecisive about or things that I’m not sure about, it really helps me and boosts me in that same area of my life. When I am doubting my own spiritual authority, the more that I can walk it out and allow the space in my home to be something that serves me and brings me joy, it is so uplifting and refreshing.
So even though last week’s episode and this week’s episode probably seem like polar opposites, they are not. Everything is connected. I hope this encourages you to take authority over the walls in your home. Refresh them. Make them something that is a reflection of you and the home that you want to create and the atmosphere that you want to create for your family.
I am going to close this episode with the same words by Sally Clarkson. She said,
“My parents understood that the world that they made within the walls of our house was what constituted home. So I grew up in spaces framed by art and color, filled with candlelight, marked by beauty.”
