Hanging Photos

I got rid of my dining room because it had become Tom's office. I made it into a study, which is really Tom's office. I had a vision of what I wanted and one of the things in my vision was covering the walls with my kids' artwork and pictures. Today I worked on making this a reality.

I have had the main wall mapped out for some time. The other day I bought the frames, and with my friend, SueG's help we began the task of hanging the photos. I am not a bad hanger when it comes to pictures. When I was a youngster I hung first pictures of Lance Kerwin, then Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson and finally Tom Selleck on my bedroom walls. But these were pictures ripped out of Tiger Beat Magazine and not framed. (Well, except for that one Tom Selleck framed photo) I eventually moved on to framed photos.

One day I hung a collage of frames and pictures on one of my walls. My work ethic went like this: I would hold up the picture, stand at arm's length to eye it, mark it with a pencil, hammer in the nail, hang the picture. Then I moved on to the next one. Just as I was finishing this job my father happen by the doorway to my room. He was appalled at my technique. He wanted to enlighten me by explaining how I should be measuring from the ceiling down and how I should be measuring in between each frame so the distance would be the same. I pointed out that everything looked even. He went outside and brought back a yardstick and proceeded to measure what I had hung. It was almost perfect. He never questioned me again. Thus I was born to hang pictures.

Today was a tad harder than those days in my bedroom. First of all SueG and I argued about how high to start. She wanted to start almost to the ceiling and I pointed out that all the experts state that frames should be at eye level. I won't repeat what she replied as SueG can be a bit colorful, but I did win the argument. We worked out the following arrangement: SueG did all the math and measurements. I decided whether things were crooked or even and did all the hammering and hanging. It took forever.

By the time we had to leave we still had 7 frames left to hang. Later that evening I attempted to finish the job. I got 2 frames done to complete the second row and then realized that the third row was not going to work. Not only would it be too low on the wall, but three of the frames would not be spaced right because we had measured incorrectly. I decided the job looked fine the way it was and declared it complete (after making several frantic calls to people I knew).

The other wall was done by my husband. It took way longer and he was a tad grouchy at the end. But I'm happy with the results. Once I get real photos in them I will post close-ups.