Putting odd wall space to use

I have a major staircase redo in the works, but until then, I'm adding this post to Beth's party!
Thank you for your encouragement about my last post! You are all so wonderful and it warmed my heart. Thanks to those who have already gotten in touch with me -- I'm so excited about working with you all!!

So you may have heard me complain about our lack of beautiful stairway railings in our house. (Especially at Christmas with the GORG garland wrapped around them.) I only have myself to blame for this -- hubby wanted them when we were building our house but I was already hyperventilating about the growing size of our mortgage with every. single. little. thing. we were adding. The extra four grand for railings (come on) was enough to put me over the edge.

So I've dealt with what we have. Which is a bunch of HUUUUGE walls on our stairway. It is open to the top of our house, about 25 feet up, so there's lots of space to work with. I've done a couple things to fill these spaces, the first of which I wanted to share with you today:

I started with a vinyl rub on from Uppercase Living. If you haven't heard about them, I wrote about the products here. I love this stuff!! Luuuuurve it!

I found floating frames at Joann's at half off -- I've probably spent about $50 on all of them. I love that there is no mat, just the wall showing through:
I started taking my own pictures of our son when he was itty bitty -- the baby who NEVER cried screamed like a banshee for his first professional pictures -- so that day I went home, stripped him down, laid him on black fabric, and shot away. I did this often his first year or so:
**This does not work with a two-year-old. :)

I didn't use any kind of design to put these up -- just hung them willy nilly, and I love doing it that way:
It's one of the first things you see when you walk into our home and it's one of my favorite spots. I just added a new one today, and may add one more, but I don't know. I like all the "white space":

I always suggest this kind of wall for weird hallways and stairways. I think it is a beautiful way to deal with awkward spaces like this. The pictures cost me nothing because I print them at home, on regular paper. Love it!

And yes, I hang my head at the awful lack of stepdaughter pictures. I am really a good stepmom, I swear. It's hard getting a good picture of a teenager -- especially when they don't live with you full time. (Or hardly ever come over anymore cause they are too busy with work, choir, friends, boyfriend, school, sporting events....wait, sorry....rant.) Sniff. :)