Plaidophile

Over on The Book Of Biff I just posted a description of how I hang pictures perfectly every time:

I live alone and hanging paintings is not a problem. I just eyeball where I want the first one to go, then I use the top of it as a reference point. Then I face the next picture against the wall and pull up on the wire and then measure the distance from the wire to the top of the frame, and then I know that’s how far down from the top line to put the next hook.

As far as horizontal positioning, I just add up the widths of all the pictures, subtract that from the width of the wall, and then divide that by one more than the number of pictures. That gives me the inter-picture (and picture-to-corner) spacing S, and so working from the outside in I start at S, add half the width of that picture to get the horizontal position where the nail should go, then hang the picture, and from its next edge I add S, and so on. By doing one on the left and then one on the right, I’ll end up with a nice balanced gap in the middle (assuming an even number of pictures). For an odd number of pictures, for the last one I just take the midway point between the right edge of the rightmost left and the left edge of the leftmost right to get where to hang the center one.

It’s not totally precise but it’s close enough. Sometimes I end up with a picture higher or lower than the top-line (since my initial measurement sometimes doesn’t tense the wire enough), in which case I just have to make another hole directly above or below the original one.

Math is useful!