Frugal DIY picture wall

We have this big empty wall in the dining room. Every time while having meal we are always thinking about decorating it. It only took us 15 months to actually do it!

I wanted to put there selection of frames. They can be really expensive.  I saw in Cargo and in John Lewis some black frames which I liked and prices were from £12 to £28 for frame! We needed quite a few of them. So I did a little walk around local charity shops and sew a few frames which with a little bit of love (and some paint) would look great. Most of the frames in charity shops were for £0.99! So much better price for our little budget.

Then I have also bought some cheap frames from the Works. I have paid £4 for 3. They were good just had this neon green colour and were plastic, but painted black nobody will see any difference from expensive wooden ones.

So first I have striped all frames from their pictures. The charity ones had so many staples in them that it took me a while but for that money it was worth it.

Then I have sprayed it with primer. Good thing about this paint is that it can be used on any material. So I needed just one paint for my wooden & plastic & metal bits on frames.

I put them on cardboard and sprayed them outside. I have used white primer because I used it for ceramic bowl and didn't want to buy black one too. In the end it was actually better. Frames needed number of coats and I could see where the white primer was still showing below the black paint (it needed more paint on that place). I did a lots of thin coats.

I did a lots of pictures with white primer but unfortunately no any with actual black paint.
Also I have bought big MDF letter S (to make our wall more funky) and painted its sides dark grey and front blue/green colour. It was left over paint from painting our front door. So I didn't need buy any paint for it.

I have then spent about 2 days putting some pictures & staff from our holidays in the frames. I have found number of entry tickets from our holidays and it was nice to actually use them for something.

My favourite frame is this with our corks. First one is from our fist meal in our new house and others are 1st Christmas in our house in 2012 and 2nd is from our 2nd Christmas in 2013.

So after some help from my husband and also another run to the Homebase for some more of non damaging stickers for frames our wall looks like this.