How to Make a Project More Complicated Than It Needs to Be

All right, picking up right where we left off...here it is...my weird, hybrid method for hanging a bunch of stuff by myself. Again, I probably made this a little more complicated and time-consuming than it needed to be, but it worked. For me.

First, I taped the area of my wall I planned to hang the frames. Your eyes are not deceiving you, the tape lines look crooked. It's partly the plaster wall...probably partly my taping.

I measured those tape lines and then...

...taped the area on my kitchen nook floor! Yup. Crazy! I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. It made perfect sense in my head...

Now, my taped area probably didn't exactly match the area on the wall, but I didn't care, it was close enough and gave me an idea of the space I had to work with.

After the area was taped, I did the whole arrange/rearrange thing...again.

Once I finally decided on an arrangement, I had to attach wall hooks, so I could hang the finished frames whichever way I deemed appropriate.

Then, since my only assistant was someone without opposable thumbs, I needed to use another trick I've learned to hang things. (I really have no idea where I got this from, but I am certain I didn't make it up myself!) Tape the back of the frame, put a hole where your hanger is, then take the tape off and stick it to the wall where you want it. Got it?

No?

Okay...put a piece of tape across the length of the frame, being careful to line it up, and then poke a hole where your hook is or I guess you can make a mark, whatever floats your boat. This works really well for hanging pictures or shelves with two or more hooks/hangers!

Then stick the pieces of tape to the wall where you plan on hanging your frame or whatever. Again, for hanging shelves and frames with more than one hook, using a level at this point is very important! Why bother with this step? Well, it helps you plan the space, keeps you from putting extra holes in your wall, and I think it's easier than measuring, remeasuring, calculating, drawing marks on your wall you can't see anyway, etc.

Using my picture of the chosen frame arrangement as my guide, I stuck a few pieces of tape to the wall, occasionally measuring to be sure I had enough space between frames. I also occasionally checked things with a level, just to be sure I wasn't completely off with everything.

I started with the "most important" frame, the one I consider a focal point or tend to look at first. Since I have plaster walls, I used my smallest drill bit to drill a tiny hole in the wall right where the hole was in my tape (if you don't have plaster walls or crazy paneling, then you can probably skip this). Once the hole was drilled, I hammered in a nail- the nail was slightly larger than the hole I drilled, so it was still nice and snug in there. :) Then, I ripped the tape off and hung the frame.  

Keep going, one by one, and adjust as needed. The nice thing about using tape is that you can move it around as much as you need. I realized I needed "go outside the lines" and ended up putting my topmost frame above my tape line. No biggie. At least I didn't drill a hole in the wall before I realized that!

I actually had fun with this part. It was the initial arranging/rearranging that drove me nuts. Once I was committed to a design, it was smooth sailing, in spite of some improvising.

Having a quiet critic/supervisor is also helpful...

Pulling off all the tape was fun...kind of like an unveiling!

Voila! What do you think?! Worth the suspense?

Note: I was going to put frames on both of those walls, but realized that I didn't have enough frames to divide between two walls without looking weird. I concentrated on this wall...and actually ended up leaving two of my frames out completely...for now. One was an oval and it looked odd being the only round frame among all those lines; the other was a simple rectangle. Maybe I'll add them later. Maybe not. Who knows!