Hanging pictures on your wall is one of the best ways to give life to your walls. While it can look pretty simple to do, it can be a bit daunting once you actually get down to the task.
For example, how heavy is your picture? Can you use nails or not? What’s the best location to place it?
You want to make sure you have everything prepared so you don’t end up misplacing the frames or making extra holes in the wall.
We’ll go over several ways to hang pictures on your wall and make them look stunning, so keep reading!
How To Hang Pictures On Wall
There are several steps involved with hanging a picture, or a gallery on a wall. First you need to determine where the right place to hang the picture is.
You also need to keep in mind various factors, for example the lighting of the surrounding area. Whether you have a drywall, or a plaster wall, also plays a huge role in the process of hanging a picture on a wall.
We’ll cover each step below and make you a picture hanging pro by the end of this post.
Pick The Best Location For Hanging Pictures
Before you begin putting up pictures on your wall, you need to decide the best location to hang them.
In order to bring out the best in your pictures, pick a wall out of direct light. The picture below is a great example of where TO NOT hang your picture:
If you hang your picture on a wall like the image above, the light will fall on it directly. This will cause your picture to reflect light and it will not be clearly visible.
Therefore, pick a wall that the light from the room, or the windows, doesn’t hit directly as shown in the image below:
As you can see, this makes the picture clear and brings an artistic vibe to your interior.
Next, you need to focus on how high to hang your picture. A general rule of thumb is to hang your picture 57 inches from the ground which is around the average eyesight level.
The Tools You’ll Need
Now that you’ve decided the perfect spot to hang your picture, it’s time to learn about the different tools you will need for hanging them on the wall. If you have drywall, you’ll want to use drywall anchors.
Drywall anchors are ideal for holding pictures on a drywall. Regular nails can’t handle weight more than a few pounds on a drywall.
If you have a plaster wall, you can use both normal nails and drywall anchors. In order to use normal nails, you’ll have to find a stub in your wall. If you hammer the nail in a hollow place, it’ll fall right out once enough pressure is put on it.
Therefore, we suggest you to use drywall anchors on plaster walls as well, but if you don’t have them, you can always use the old hammer and a nail.
It also helps to have an electric screwdriver, but it is not mandatory. Lastly, you’ll need a measuring tape and a hammer.
How To Hang Pictures On A Wall With Nails?
Now with everything decided, let’s figure out how to hang a picture on a wall with nails.
As stated earlier, we suggest not hammering nails on a drywall, instead use drywall anchors into which you’ll be inserting the screws.
We’ll show how to hang pictures with both nails and drywall anchors.
How To Hang Pictures On A Wall Using A Hammer And Nail?
The first step is to find a stub in the wall. Having a stub finder definitely helps finding stubs but it is not necessary.
You can lightly knock on the wall and when you feel a solid sound (meaning it’s not hollow), that’s the place you’ll be hammering the nail.
Measure the total height of your frame from top to bottom, and place marks on the wall according to the dimensions you calculated.
Now measure the distance between the top of the picture frame to the frame hanger.
Using the calculated distance from above, place a marker on the wall.
Now take a nail and use your trusty hammer to nail it inside the wall.
One tip to make sure the nail is pushed into the wall correctly, is to hit the nail with the hammer horizontally. The image below is an example of how NOT TO hammer a nail:
As you can see in the image, when you bring your hammer down from an upward angle, you risk damaging the wall and the area around the nail gets weaker. This way, your nail will not be durable enough to hang a picture.
Now Look at the image below:
As you can see, the image above shows the hammer striking the nail in a horizontal motion. This will make sure your nail slides right into the wall without damaging it.
Once the nail is in place, simply hang your picture and et voila, you are now an artist!
How To Hang Pictures On A Wall Using Drywall Anchors?
The process is pretty simple, calculate the point where you’ll be drilling the drywall anchor. You do this by measuring the total height of your canvas minus the height from the top of the frame to the frame holder to pin.
If you have an electric screwdriver, simply screw the drywall anchor in place. If you don’t have an electric screwdriver, you can use a normal screwdriver as well.
First, make a small hole by applying pressure on the screwdriver, drywall is pretty weak against pointed force so you shouldn’t have any problem doing this.
Once you’ve made a small hole, use your screwdriver to plug the drywall anchor into the wall.
Now that the drywall anchor is in place, you want to take a normal screw and screw it inside the drywall anchor.
Lastly, hang your frame by the nail and you’re done!
How To Hang Pictures On A Wall Without Nails?
The best way to hang pictures on a wall without nails is to use a special kind of sticky tape.
If you want to hang your pictures for temporary duration, you want to use a temporary sticky tape such as Unibond No More Nails Strip.
Temporary sticky tapes can support up to 1-2 KG of weight.
If you want a more permanent solution, go for permanent sticky tape which can hold up to 122KG of weight. This is the best way where you don’t have to use nails at all for hanging pictures on a wall.
Conclusion
We’ve covered different aspects of hanging a picture on a wall such as making sure you’re placing it in the right spot away from direct surrounding light.
We also went over whether to use nails or drywall anchors depending on your wall type, and also what to do if you don’t want to use nails.
If you’ve followed our given steps so far, congratulations, you are now an expert at hanging pictures and creating galleries on your wall.
Check out more content here and let us know if you have any questions or suggestions in the comments below.