An extremely easy way to personalize your house is to include family pictures. With people taking digital pictures daily, it is surprising how few physical pictures that people have in their house. I get it, if you are like me, many of your pictures are of things (i.e., the garden plants you are eyeing, the dog, sunsets) and not people – but people, this is a problem.
I have mentioned in my previous posts that once a year I make everyone take family pictures. This is generally when the grandparents are visiting in the summer or at Thanksgiving so that we can leverage them as our photographer.
Yes, it is a very casual affair as in come as you are (well, looks like I dictated Seahawks sweatshirts one year) but you maybe brush your hair and make sure that your shirt is clean type affair. The key to a good picture is to take lots of pictures in rapid succession. I do not think that my youngest son has ever taken a bad photo, but my oldest and I are blinkers.
We have the routine down and can take a complete a series in about 30 minutes, i.e. family shot, couple shot, kids shot, individual shots, grandparents, kids with grandparents etc. It is a well-oiled machine but not so much so that after we came in this year from taking the pictures we realized the dog was not in any of the shots. Back outside (best place for taking them given the natural light and nature) and five minutes later we had a shot with the dog where everyone, except maybe the dog, looked good.
Once the pictures are taken, we hand them over to my husband who is in change or shorting for the best shots, creating a shared library, and inviting everyone to join. I oversee using Shutterfly to print some physical photos to display around the house. The family picture always hangs on the wall by the entry but I like the scatter the rest of the pictures throughout the house. For that, I need some great frames that help make the pictures part of the décor.
Not sure how the divisions of responsibilities would break down in your family, but I strongly recommend that you do this once a year. It is so nice to see the pictures daily and also have a fun record of the year-to-year changes and all the bad hairstyles in between. At some point, I noticed that I had shrunk significantly because both my boys were towering over me.
Here are some very affordable and stylish frames that you might want to use to frame your favorites! I really love the multi-pane marble one from Amazon for $25 and have two of them plus a couple of the similar design in 5×7″ size. I also have the square chevron one which is a fun size and the floating pane black one. Will probably buy the teal one since that is a color that I loving right now – click HERE for more teal accents! Click away for more details if you see something you like.