You can give the area inside a frame a distinctive treatment by choosing a different paint color from the rest of the wall and even choosing a third shade for the frame itself. If you do this, save yourself a lot of work by painting the walls before installing the frames. Prepaint the frames, too. Wallpaper or stenciled motifs are other possible treatments for the field inside the frame. Expect to spend about 1 hour for a single wall frame; time per frame decreases when you’re making and installing a batch. Plan out the sizes of all desired frames before you begin. Here’s an example for a typical wall frame. The installation site has a 3-inch-high baseboard and a chair rail with its bottom edge 36 inches above the floor. Assume that you want the frame 5 inches above the baseboard and 3 inches below the chair rail. This produces a vertical frame size of 25 inches. Multiply that by 1.618 for a Golden Rectangle, and the length is 40.45 inches, or approximately 40-7/16 inches. If you’re running a number of frames along a wall, the space between them should be about the same as the top and bottom spacing. In this case, 4 inches is a good compromise between the top and bottom spacing. Editor’s Tip: To ensure your frames look scaled to the rest of your room, measure the length of the wall and decide how many frames you’d like per wall and how far apart you’d like them to hang. These measurements will prevent frames that are too large (or small) for the space.
