Welcome to this month’s DIY Challenge! Every month our wonderful hostess Terrie, from Decorate and More With Tip, creates the best challenges for us to accomplish. She is the BEST! If you’ve never met Terrie before, you can visit herhere . 

If you are coming here from Danya’s,  A Vintage Flare Farmhouse, I’m so glad that you are here!

This month’s challenge is one that I think a lot of people struggle with. It’s decorating your TV wall. Can I get an Amen? Back in the day our TV’s found themselves behind closed doors. In an armoire or built in shelving or cabinets . Today’s TV is much larger and thinner than those of old, so putting them behind closed doors creates a major problem, especially if you aren’t putting it above your fireplace!

My fireplace mantel is so far off the ground that if we tried to put our TV there it would be like sitting on the front row in a movie theater.

And nobody wants to do that!

So over the past few years our TV has lived sitting on a large cherrywood  console.

It’s like a humongous black hole.

And to make matters worse, we live stream now so the large hole below the TV, where all of the equipment used to live, is no longer needed.

But that’s a challenge for another day!

So how do you decorate around the TV to make it look like a part of the room?

I’ll be honest, I’ve been looking around for ideas for quite a few months.

I knew it had to be simple so that it didn’t compete with the fireplace wall.

Cause there’s  a lot goin’ on there.

Not as easy as it sounds.

Then I saw this photo from La Dolce Vita blog and thought not only how pretty and outside of the box it was, but also how genius to use something that I already had in my cabinets!

So I gathered my supplies.

Scissors, pen, brown paper, nails, hammer, plate hangers, blue tape and level.

And dug through the cabinets for some blue and white plates in several sizes.

The first thing I did was to draw the outline of each plate onto paper, then cut the silhouettes out.

Once I had them cut out, I started placing the outlines onto my wall using blue tape.

I always do this for gallery walls as it allows me the freedom to move them around until I’m happy with the arrangement.

Once I have the arrangement on the wall just right, I then lay the plates out to correspond with the template arrangement.

That makes it super easy to put the right plate in the right spot.

I put plate hangers onto each plate.

Then measure from the top of the plate to the top of the hanger.

Leaving the template on the wall, using the measurements I just took from the plate and hanger, I measured down from the top of the template for the picture hanger placement.

I nail right through the paper.

Then, I pull the paper off of the wall.

Next, hang the plate.

Works like a charm every time!

In the beginning I left two botanical art pieces up to go with the plates.

However, I still felt like I had a heavy black hole.

The scale was off. 

After a few days of living with it.

I had a lightbulb moment.

In one of the guest bedrooms there were a pair of old small armoire doors.

Once they replaced the botanicals, I knew I had my scale just right.

So much better!

Now, I’m on to the next challenge.

The TV console.

Do I paint or no?

Does it stay or should it go?

The struggle is real my friends AND now I’ve got the song “should I stay or should I go now…” in my head!

Remember, if you like it, please be sure to PIN it!

Next up is Teresa from Through A Vintage Door.

I can’t wait to see what she has to share with us today.