I’ll admit it. Wall decor isn’t something we have covered much here at HomeFixated. In fact, most of our wall-related coverage inevitably involves smashing said wall with a hammer or other opportune demolition device. Every once in a while we need to mix things up. Now that I’m a fancy-pants Realtor, decor and generally how homes are perceived by others is more on my radar than in past times. A while back, the stark emptiness of our bathroom walls was driving me crazy. This ultimately led me to a quick, simple, yet very cool decorating idea that can be customized to suit your location, home style and even hobbies. It involves some off-the-shelf inexpensive Ikea frames and vintage postcards in a style of your choosing sourced off ebay.
Although my real estate work spans most of the San Diego region (and sometimes beyond), my most focused-on neighborhood is a coastal community called Point Loma. I was doing some googling of the neighborhood as part of my research on the area and stumbled across a vintage postcard of the area on eBay. I then search for the neighborhood just on ebay and found dozens of listings showing cool vintage postcards with a variety of scenes from the neighborhood. They were so cool, and so cheap (many were just a few bucks), I couldn’t resist making them into a little project.
While my themes were all focused on my neighborhood, there are vintage postcards available on ebay in a zillion different themes. Pick something relevant to your home and/or your interests and shop away! Picking out the ideal vintage postcards is really the hardest part of this project. From there, all you need is a quick order of small, cheap photo frames from Ikea, some acid-free tape, and you’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll!
The particular frames I liked at the time from IKEA had a rear stand that made them hang in an less-than-ideal fashion. My simple solution to this problem was just to rip the stand right off the frame. That worked fine and allowed me to mount the photo frames much more cleanly.
Once I had the vintage postcards mounted in the frames, I liked to play around with different layouts on a flat surface before hammering nails into the wall. While I used three in my particular plans, you could easily decorate your wall with 10 or 20+ frames too. By hindsight I actually wished I had done 5 or so frames instead of three. Next time! The nice thing about the low price-point of this project is you can scale it to whatever size wall you have and it still remains a very inexpensive technique for handling wall decor.
Nice ideas, thanks for share