How To Hang Pictures

One of the more overwhelming parts of moving, at lease for me, is having all of the photos/decorations from the old house and trying to find a way to decorate the new place, while doing it in a hurry so they're not lying all over.  I found this idea on Pinterest, originally from Better Homes & Gardens, to cut paper to the size of your pictures and tape it on the wall before hanging them.  So I decided to try that for our living room family photo wall.  I was also partially incorporating this idea, originally from Martha Stewart, to line up one side of the frames and let the other sides vary.

I used two brown grocery bags, traced my pictures onto them, and cut them out.  I marked where the nails would go, and gave them appropriate names, such as "odd-shaped 4 frame" or "nieces and nephews".  Yes, those were really my names for some of them.  I taped them up, and used a level to get them mostly straight.  I may be a perfectionist in some things, but this is apparently not one of them.  The 2 longs pieces of blue tape were my level lines, and as long as everything else pretty much line up with those, it was fine.

I did that all during naptime, so then when the boys woke up, I just pounded all the nails in, ripped the paper down, and hung the pictures up.  The bag part of it took me around 45 minutes, and the actual hanging only took me about 5 minutes.

And here's the after shot.  Some of the pictures were a little crooked, because after I hung these, I was pounding on the other side of the wall in the boys' room.  But overall, it worked really well, and I didn't have any "oops" holes in the wall like I normally do when I hang things.