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 |
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.
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