OK, mrs_clubber and I just repainted the living room, plugged all the nail holes from clubber family pix. Now to rehang. What’s the best way? Don’t want to desecrate newly-patched walls with more holes. How do you, the viewers at home, hang your pictures?
Frankly, nothing beats nails. OK, the holes suck, but how often do you move your pictures around, really? I’ve tried those self-adhesive hangers, but they’ve proven to be less than satisfactory, either falling off in a few months or being nearly impossible to remove without doing worse damage to the wall than a nail would.
Yeah, there’s really no good way other than nails. Just make sure you have a stud finder so you don’t hammer the nail in to a weak section of wall and cause a bigger hole. For smaller pictures, you can also get away with using a pushpin, it leaves less of a hole. I do this with many of my 8X10 pics and have had no trouble with them falling off the wall.
Only one request: Please hang your pictures at EYE LEVEL. My sister hangs all her stuff about 1 foot below the ceiling, it drives me crazy!!!
4 kids, 4 grandkids, Lautrec, Dali prints, chinese woodcut prints…there will be stuff for every eye level. Why we bothered to even paint when there’s at most 12 square inches of wall showing is a question only mrs_clubber can answer…
and she’s not talking.
First, you find out what your walls are made of before you can decide the best way to hang them. I have hung hundreds of pictures cause Im an artist. Lucky for me, Im the height of an average man so I can hang things right at eye level… You also have to know the weight of the pictures first.
Nails are okay for wood walls, plaster walls might require plaster nail solutions, of which your hardware store should have.
If you want to get fancy (and expensive), you can buy ceiling molding and install it around the tops of the walls, then use hooks to attach to the molding and suspend wires down to the pictures. This is a classy way for hanging framed pictures, used mostly in older houses that have 10’ ceilings, lots of molding and trim, and plaster (rather than sheet-rock) walls which don’t take nails very gracefully. But, again, this is a very expensive alternative and means the additional hassle of installing (and painting) the molding and also means that every picture you hang will become a major production and will require a ladder, special hooks, and wires and so on.
So . . . I’d just go with the nails. And some people like to put down some scotch tape in a cross shape before they nail, so that when it is removed, there is less likelihood of making a bigger hole in the wall. (But even that is mostly overkill, in my experience.)
And you just need to find the studs if you’re installing something with significant weight, say, in excess of 10-20 lbs, or if it’s medium heavy but very valuable and fragile.
And save a quart or pint or so of that paint so that you can patch and paint over holes when you do find yourself moving things around, without feeling like you have to repaint the entire room.
So what’s the best way to hang pictures in an apartment with painted concrete walls? Not the ‘drill hole, insert expanding plastic plug thingie, hammer nail into plug’ routine? I am reluctant to damage the walls, which is why I have no pictures hung.
Sorry, Sunspace, IANA contractor or interior decorator, so you may get other ideas from someone else, but I think that “the ‘drill hole, insert expanding plastic plug thingie, hammer nail into plug’ routine” works better than anything that involves glue because glue tends to break down and fail after a while. But drilling a hole is pretty easy to do and can always be patched, just like gyp-rock, with some joint-compound stuff. And you might want to use a screw instead of a nail–it will hold tighter in the wall and is easier to remove when you want to take it out.
(and if you’re in an apartment, then you probably will be free to rely on your landlord to cover over any holes you make in the wall [so long as they’re no bigger than a breadbox 
] )
You cannot hang pictures based solely on the location of the wall studs. Nails won’t work very well if the picture is heavy and there isn’t a stud to hold the nail. You have to use some form of anchor for drywall or plaster for that matter. There are many types but I sorta like the ones that drill into the drywall and then you insert a screw into them. I think they are called Zip-Its.
There is a special bracket and “key” lock they use on hotel pictures - (you know - the ones that seem welded flat to the walls) - we bought a few pictures that had those bracket already on them during a hotel liquidation sale (lots of those in Las Vegas!).
We went to one of the chain frame places and showed the clerk the back of the frame…they knew exactly what we needed.
Now, all the pictures in our house are hung that way - flat to the wall and they ain’t never coming down unless we unlock the back with the special gizmo key. We even have glass shadow boxes on the outside patio wall and despite strong winds - no problem.
If you nail into a stud in a plaster wall & take the nail out, later you have a huge hole sometimes…
“So what’s the best way to hang pictures in an apartment with painted concrete walls?”
You ever see that commercial on tv for that sticky stuff used to hang pictures on walls that way? I think its from 3m & later you can just pull it & it comes off cleanly.
I often use sewing needles instead of nails. I use a pair of pliers to break the needle and then use the thickest end to hang the picture on. On some of my heavier paintings I used two needles. I got this idea from a magazine (can’t recall which one), and in the small article it mentioned this works well for items up to 50 lbs. I have no idea how accurate that is, but doubt I’d put it to the test. I will say that I have never had problems, YMMV.
When hanging any picture:
Please make sure that the horizontal center line of the picture is at 56 inches from the floor. That’s the “eye-level” height that makes the average observer happy.
How to calculate:
Start with 56 inches.
Measure the height of the framed picture. (We’ll call that number x) Divide that measurement by two (in other words: 1/2 x) and add it to the original 56.
56 + 1/2 x
Now pull the hanging wire up in two places–where the picture hangers will go (each about a third of the way in)–and measure
from the top of the frame to the wire. We’ll call that measurement y. Subtract it from the first computation:
(56 + 1/2 x) - y = z
Nail your two picture-hanging hooks into the wall, making sure that the bottom of the hooks hit z, as measured from the floor.
Hang picture. Congratulate self.
VARIATION: If you use TWO pieces of picture-wire, each the same length and attached to the same set of eyelets on the frame, and loop one wire one on one hanger and one wire on the other, your picture will never hang crooked.
Upside down— makes for great converstation
We don’t use just nails - we use picture-hanging hooks that guide the nail in at an angle. Never worry about studs, but then, we don’t hang extremely heavy stuff. They come in a variety of sizes, labeled by weight, and we’ve never had problems with oversized holes or hook failure. I prefer them to plain nails.
Thanks for all the input - maybe just nails like last time. Although we rarely move pix, we need to add to them on a semi-regular basis (those kids of mine - they breed like rabbits ) and there’s always a newborn mishapen-head baby pic to find a place for…