It’s time to reveal some more progress in my new apartment. To be more specific: the dining room. As I’m sure you saw in this post, my new wall “art” on the back wall of my dining room. Here is the breakdown of how I came up with the arrangement and executed it.

If you can recall, my old dining room looked like this.

But now that I have a much larger dining room I wanted to rotate my dining room table so that it runs parallel with the back wall. That being said, I needed to come up with a new arrangement for my snazzy West Elm Kelly Wearstler-esque medallions.

I originally thought of rotating them 90 degrees [2 high, 4 across] but they needed a little more height to not get lost behind my pendant lamp so I had to get a little creative. Luckily my four Barbara Barry chair plates [shown below] won’t fit above my new living room window so I now have those to mix into my new gallery idea.

Because I’m a big time planner, I whipped out the graph paper and played with a few arrangement options [to scale] to see which look I liked best.

The circles are obviously the plates and the squares are the medallions. A. places the places on diagonals, B. is a random arrangement, C. puts the plates in all four corners, and D. keeps everything in line. After seeing this on paper, I was able to weed out B. the random arrangement. I then moved to the next step of actually laying out the pieces on the table to get a full visual.

After taking pictures on my phone and then holding the phone in front of the wall [I wish I had pictures of how awesome that was] I was torn between option A. and D. And after much deliberation I went with option D because A. was still just a little to crazy ;)

Because we had previously scaled everything out we knew that the overall piece would be 32″ x 44″ [each element was 8" x 8" or 8" in diameter and spaced 4" apart.. yay math]. So we taped out a 32″ x 44″ rectangle on the wall centered with the wall and at the correct height off of the floor.

Next came the scary part, hanging it all. We started with the corners to keep everything level and within the 32″ x 44″ constraints.

Then after a lot of exact measuring and praying we placed each of the inside pieces exactly 4″ apart as we had planned and everything lined right up! The part that was difficult is that the medallions have 4 nail holes [one at each corner] and the plates had one hook almost dead center on the back which made measuring a little difficult, and made me glad that I chose that pattern so that all the crazy plates with their weird hooks would be in a line.

I ended up only using the top two nail holes in the medallions and making sure I left about 1″ of nail sticking out so that I could offset the medallions from the wall to be a little more sculptural and create some fun shadows and depth.

So here it is! as you can see Maggie is pretty pumped about the whole thing. Did you miss the beginning of the dining room redesign? You can read about how to hang a pendant lamp from a can light here.

Until next time!

cfs