About 15 years ago (I don’t remember exactly), I got tired of having our multitude of family portraits in boxes where no one could see them. To get them out of the boxes, I decided to make our upstairs hallway a portrait gallery because: (1) there was nothing hanging on any of those walls; and (2) I didn’t have room for this many portraits anywhere else. I went through the boxes, selected the best pictures, measured and counted them, and bought hundreds of dollars worth of frames ($400+ I think). I framed them and printed identifying labels to attach to the backs of the frames–names, dates, etc. Then I needed a plan to arrange the portraits on the walls.

When Kathy came for a weekend visit, she and I stayed up very late one night, sorting and arranging the framed portraits. We could have quit earlier and gone to bed, but we were really into the project. We measured the hallway walls and laid everything out to scale on the bedroom floors in a variety of ways to construct a pleasing presentation.

The result of Kathy’s and my planning is that Wall #1, at the head of the stairs, is dedicated to our immediate family–Ted, me, and our four children. These are portraits of all six of us as babies, in first grade, and at high school graduation, as well as a few miscellaneous related portraits of our family and Ted’s and my “entire elementary school” pictures. We went to small rural schools, so there was room for everyone in a single picture.

Wall #2, the shortest wall, has just enough room for the two oversized frames in my collection. One is from my Grandma S. and includes the senior pictures of her 1911 high school graduating class of 12 students with three teachers. The other is from Ted’s mom and has the high school graduation pictures of her four children, and the six grandchildren she had at the time she assembled the collage.

Wall #3, the longest, is the wedding and history wall. I have wedding portraits of Ted’s and my parents, our grandparents, ourselves, and our married children. I also have a number of portraits and historically interesting pictures of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and a few other relatives.

Wall #4, the last remaining space in the hallway, is the grandchildren wall. We already had a few grandchildren at the time Kathy and I designed the gallery and I thought there would be plenty of room for all the grandchildren’s pictures on that wall. That wasn’t true. With nine grandchildren, and multiple pictures of some at different ages, I was doing ok until 2021, when Hadley (grandchild) and Ollie (great-grandchild) were born. We already have one grandchild who is married and had a baby, and several others are at a marriageable age and are likely to present us with more great-grandchildren. To make room for Hadley, Ollie, and future additions to the family, Ted and I spent the afternoon today re-arranging the grandchildren wall. We think we left enough space for at least six additional babies before we have to worry about a future adjustment.

Walls #1, 2, and 3 don’t change much over time because they’re all past history. Wall #4 was good for a long time and has now been compressed to make more space. As our grandchildren began graduating from high school, however, Ted and I realized we needed more gallery space. We decided to start Wall #5 along the stairway. We began with some portraits of ourselves that we didn’t have room for on Wall #3 and then transitioned to graduation pictures. When Alex got married in 2019, we had to find space for the wedding portraits of our grandchildren too, so we decided that, because the stairway wall is pretty long, we can call it the “growing up” family wall. This wall has lots of room for expansion and it gives us something to look at as we go up and down the stairs.