How to DIY a Picture Rail

 
If you're like me, you can't stand having the same pictures on your wall for very long before wanting to change them up for something completely new. You can't just keep hammering new nails into your wall to accommodate all the different sizes of art, because pretty soon your wall would be all holes and no art. That's where a picture rail comes in!

We've all seen it, mostly in restaurants: an unobtrusive rail on the wall, from which any number of pictures of all different sizes can be hung and switched out with ease. The picture rail allows you to slide the art along its length so you can position it anywhere on the wall, and you can use any length of wire to adjust the height. A picture rail sounds like your dream, right? But how do you get one?

Well, the cheapest and longest pre-made picture rail I could find was nothing more than a 95-inch strip of moulding, and cost 22.40 plus shipping. That doesn't cover the cost of hooks and wires and installation supplies. If you're still like me, you're thinking you could do better than that, and you're right!

Here's how I made a picture rail that extends the length of an entire wall of my living room, and cost me almost nothing!

Supplies

• Measuring and marking tools -- a tape measure and a pencil
• 1 piece of wood moulding cut to length
• A Dremel and cutting wheel (I'm open to suggestions on better tools for this process—basically you need something that can cut a groove down the length of your moulding. One alternative is to find a piece of moulding that already has a groove or lip you could hang a hook from!)
• A stud finder
• A drill (strongly recommended, but optional)
• Finishing nails
• A nail sink (optional)
• Paint to match your wall (optional)
• Several picture-hanging hooks (you'll need at least one hook for every picture, but two makes it easier)
• Wire to hang the pictures

If you have to buy all of these things, this won't be a cheap project, but if you have (or borrow) most of the tools and can repurpose materials you already have, you can do it all yourself, as I did, for under 10 dollars.

Directions

Step 1: Get thee some moulding

Because the shape and size of the wooden rail will advise the measurements of every other part of this project, you really need to choose it first. Determine the approximate size of piece you're looking for, based on the length of the wall or space you want to fill. If you don't yet know, overestimate, because you can always cut it down later.

I get all my materials for minor construction projects like this at Community Forklift, my local home improvement thrift store. If you don't have any place like that nearby, you can always go to a regular construction store, where simple moulding can be bought for a dollar or less per foot. If you're looking to do less work, you should look for a piece which already has a lip about 3/8-in. wide, or a groove about 3/8 inch from the outer edge. This lip or groove is what you'll eventually hook the hanging wires onto. I couldn't find anything like that at the Forklift, so I settled for a piece of  3/4-inch shoe moulding (I had to look up its name just for this post), which is one of the cheapest and most plentiful types out there. I can't remember how much it cost, but I'm pretty sure it was less than a dollar.

Step 2: Ready the rail

If you were not lucky enough to find a piece of moulding with a conveniently sized lip already, you will next have to cut a groove into which your picture hooks will later fit. On my shoe moulding, the best place for it was on the narrower flat side, slightly closer to the rounded side than the other flat side. 

Positioning of the groove.

 

As you can guess, I wasn't a real stickler about the measurement. I just wanted the space between the groove and the edge to be wide enough that the weight of a painting wouldn't cause the wood to break.

Mark the location of the groove the full length of the moulding.

Then dig in! Like I said above, I used a Dremel and a cutting wheel for this part of the project, but I'm not sure that was the most effective option out there. It didn't cut nearly as fast as I'd expected, it produced a ton of smoke, and if I accidentally dug too deep into the wood, it shattered the cutting wheel. I lost a couple of wheels before I learned to make delicate touch-and-go strokes that enabled me to cut the groove without getting the tool jammed. It was surprisingly difficult to carve the groove an even depth and width, but that fortunately wasn't too big of a concern because it would be hidden above eye level at the top of the picture rail. 

Another view of the groove

If you know of a better way to cut a groove into a length of wood, by all means go for it! But if you don't, then the Dremel and cutting wheel are good enough.

Last substep in this part of the project—painting the rail! This is optional. A bare wood picture rail can be elegant in some rooms, but in my case, I thought it would look out-of-place with my all white-painted everything, so I chose to paint it white as well. The only matching paint I had was a gallon of white primer, so that's what I used! I've had the rail up for a couple of months, and so far it looks fine even though I never painted over the primer.

Step 3: Measure twice (or thrice, or four times, or as many as it takes to get accurate results from your stud finder!)

Once the picture rail is ready, it's time to make a commitment: where do you actually want it to be?

The wall where I planned to place my picture rail had some thick ornamental crown moulding at the ceiling (a little too baroque for my taste, but it came with the house!). I could have installed the picture rail directly below the moulding (like, stuck to its bottom), but something told me that wouldn't look right. So I gave it a little breathing room and decided to install it a few inches below the moulding. The moulding inexplicably comes to an end a few inches before the wall does. Having the picture rail stick out past the bottom of the moulding would look silly, so I decided to line up the end of my picture rail with the vertical portion of the crown moulding.

Final endpoint of my picture rail

I marked, in pencil, a few spots to align to the top of the rail.

Because the picture rail could potentially support any amount of weight, you need to be assured that it is firmly attached to the wall. And this means you need to nail it to studs, not just the drywall. Ugh, stud-finding is the bane of my existence! We have an electronic stud finder that's supposed to make this work easy, but it never really is. Prepare to spend several frustrating sessions running the stud finder along your wall until you're reasonably confident you've found the position of the studs, then mark the position of a future nail so that it will be as close to the center of each stud as possible.  

HELPFUL TIP: Mark this nail hole exactly above where you want the top of your picture rail to be, because once the rail is on the wall, you still need to be able to see the markings.

If you want to be a renegade, I suppose you could do this part without the stud finder and just attach the rail to your drywall, but you might want to use more nails, and hammer them in at different angles so they're less likely to pull out by accident.

Step 4: Hammer Time

This was a frustrating part of the project for me. I don't know if the nails were too weak, or my form was too poor, or my studs were too tough, but I bent more nails than I ever imagined possible. Because I had so much trouble getting the nails into my wall, I recommend that you pre-drill the nail holes before even touching a hammer.

This means holding the rail to the wall wherever you want it to be (you might need a partner!), then drilling through both the rail and the wall to the depth of the nail (I used 2-inch finishing nails). Even drilling a hole was difficult and sometimes impossible, so good luck! Once you have a hole, it should theoretically be simple to hammer a nail into the same spot. But I still ruined plenty of nails that way.

While I'm usually a cheapskate, I invested in a nail sink just for this project, which is a metal tool that you use when the nail has already been hammered most of the way in,. The get the nail to sink all the way into the wood, you place the pointy end of the nail sink on the head of the nail, then hit the nail sink with the hammer instead of hammering the nailhead directly. The nail sink, with its tiny tip, will push the nail deeper into the wood, without running the risk of you smashing the hammer into the wood and leaving a dent.

If you succeed in attaching the rail at both of its ends, then you can release your partner from servitude, which is helpful because then he will be fresh when you inevitably call him back to help with the hammering after you have bent too many nails and need to take a mental health break. At some point, you will both be finished, both with the work, and probably in a figurative sense as well. Take that mental health break! I'll be here when you get back!

Step 5: Cleanup

There's no time like the present, so even though you're tempted to skip on to hanging your pictures, take a few moments to make this picture rail look its best. Erase any visible pencil marks, wipe the greasy-fingerprints from every surface you touched, and dab a dot of matching paint onto each nailhead.

Step 6: Get hooked

This part was my favorite part, because it involved converting some useless hanging hooks into the most versatile hanging hooks I've ever owned. 

The hanging hooks were these, which, ridiculously, had holes that were too small for the nails that came with them. Whenever you tried to hammer one into the wall, you'd end up bending the nail on the first stroke. Totally useless. Since I didn't have anything to lose, I decided to make them into hooks for my picture rail.

With a bolt cutter, I snipped the "collar" around each nail hole on the hanging hook. This broke it into two parts, and it then fell off, which is what I wanted. 

The hook on top is one that has had the collar removed.
The one at right still needs surgery.

 Using a pair of needle-nosed pliers, I bent the top end of each hook into another hook with a reversed direction and flat top. 

The top portion was meant to slot into the groove on the picture rail, while the intact original hook would hold the picture wire.

A hook in the groove of the picture rail

You can do the same, but if you're going to have to buy hooks anyway, you might as well save yourself the effort and just get some hooks that are designed for use on a picture rail. In fact, you might want to buy the hooks first, so you can customize the position of the groove to best fit them.

Next, you'll need to shape some wire to hang your pictures from. Picture hanging wire is expensive AF! But there's no reason you need to use that! Get creative—strip some old electrical cord (or don't, and just use it with the insulation still on!). Use ribbons or shoelaces or any other kind of long skinny stuff you might have lying around.

I myself still had quite a bit of that wire I found on the street and used for my rabbit-in-a-hat costume, and so far that has proved sufficient for hanging 4 pictures, with plenty more wire to go! I'd like to come up with a way to reuse one wire for multiple lengths, but so far I've been content to cut a new piece of wire every time I want to hang a new picture.

The way I use the wire is to form a smallish loop with needle-nosed pliers. I hang this loop from one of the hooks on the rail. 

At the other end of the wire, I thread a few inches through the hole in another hanging hook, then stop it from slipping out with a series of twists to form a plug. 

One coil keeps the wire from slipping back through the hole.
The second coil was a previous attempt that ended up being too low on the wall.

This hook attaches to the hanging hardware on the back of the painting.

Step 6: Arrange and rearrange

Congratulations! You are now an art curator! The only thing left to do is to acquire a sizable collection of pictures, so you can swap them out at your whim!

Since I have had my picture rail, I've used it to hold up four different art  arrangements. 

The first was a summery set of painted-metal art pieces, which I kept next to a couple of family photos of me and my boyfriend. Next, I replaced the summery art with a Chinese brush painting of goats on a hill. This painting is the first – and for over a decade, only – piece of real art I've owned (I got it free from a neighbor who was moving out), and I am still proud of it today. When Christmas rolled around, I swapped that out for a huge snowman painting, in a style I might describe as American folk. 

Now that it's January, I've returned to the goats, supplemented with a pair of Japanese minimalist watercolors, which were Freecycle acquisitions from last month. They were originally advertised as just frames (I guess the offerer didn't think the paintings themselves would get any takers), so I'm doubly glad that they just happened to have a similar starkness to my beloved goat painting.

Quite a few different looks for one living room! What's next? Well, I've been collecting art from Freecycle every chance I get, so ultimately my goal is to be able to decorate the living room with a different theme every season! Thanks to my picture rail, now my wall can change outfits almost as often as I do!