We have some big walls in our home, and while many of them have personal photos of my kids and family, I also love creating large displays using my photos and/or colorful metal posters from Displate. I wanted to share a little about the three projects that I’ve worked on with my wife over the past year in the hopes that it may inspire others — especially people who love taking photos — to show off their photos in new ways. Let’s jump into it…
The Travel Photo Map
My wife and I love international traveling (our kids, not so much 😜), and we’ve been afforded the opportunities to do so more than most. My work for HTC and AWS has also given me an opportunity to see places around the world I likely would not otherwise have gone to. I wanted a way to easily visualize which countries I had gone to and which ones I had not.
When I came across this Wooden World Travel Photo Map by Enjoy The Wood Kickstarter campaign back in early 2024, I immediately showed it to my wife, and we agreed this would be a wonderful addition to one of our big living room walls. The fact that it was a Ukrainian company that we could support financially was a cherry on top. The thought of installing it was a bit intimidating, so it took us a little over a year before it finally got put up, but once we got started it went much faster than the we thought.
In the end, it was worth it, and it’s a wonderful thing to look at, remember some fun memories, and, of course, it’s a great discussion piece with visitors to our home. Enjoy The Wood has a variety of other wooden map products.
The Custom Displate Travel Photo Wall
I’ve been a huge fan of the European company Displate and their amazing metal wall prints for a long time. We created a movie poster wall a few years ago, and after having my animal photos printed on canvas in our front room for well over six years, I decided that I wanted something different for that space.
Displate has had custom Displates — where you can upload your own photos — for a while now, but they were limited to the smallest size (about 18″ x 13″). I knew that I wanted to have the option of larger sizes (27″ x 19″) for my travel photos, so I patiently waited until they released this as an option, and then unleashed the biggest photo project I’d ever undertaken: 27 total Displate prints. Yes, this project cost a small fortune, but it was worth it. 🥲
I was responsible for ensuring the photos were edited, upsampled if need be, and ordered. My amazing wife took on the daunting task of laying out these photos in an interesting pattern, mounting them all, and then fine-tuning the spacing…which, yes, is as tedious as it sounds.
The end result, though, makes us both smile every time we see it, and we love answering questions about the photos and where we were when they were taken. We have space for about eight more, and so over the next few years, as we travel, we will add to this collection.
One useful thing we learned: our walls are textured, and for Displates this means doubling up on the magnets for the size medium (two magnets each), and adding a third magnet for the size large prints.
A great added bonus with Displates is that you don’t need to put holes in your walls; everything is adhesives and magnets. We love this about using them!
The Office Wall Project
My last wall project was the longest in the making: I purchased most of these Displates back in 2022, but the project didn’t actually get underway until last month. Doing this project required moving my computer desk out from the wall, patching + painting the wall, mounting all the Displates, then fine-tuning the spacing. The computer desk must have gotten moved out and back again at least ten times. 😆
I had initially thought I would need to take everything off the desk before moving it, but I found that so long as everything was powered down and cables were disconnected from the wall, I could easily drag the entire desk out, which greatly simplified the project.
I initially wasn’t going to have a full bottom row and had planned to remount a shelf we removed, but after thinking about it some more, the idea of having a uniform wall of three rows was very pleasing to my Type A personality. ☺️
My amazing wife came up with the arrangement of the posters in the color gradient, as well as doing the painting, patching, and mounting them. Yes, I would be completely lost in life without her. 🥰
And there you have it: three wall projects in our home that allow us to express our personality, share interesting things with others, and put things on our wall that make us smile.