Virtually there - April 2010

 

The lovely builders are gone. The tiles are laid. The wallpaper is hung. Drapes are draped, wireless is connected, water flows when required and at no other times. Last week was the turn of the carpet layers and, as they drove away from my house-lot of premium solution dyed nylon carpet (yes, nylon; I can’t believe it either, but this made it seem like a great idea), I hired two likely lads from Student Job Search to move the furniture around endlessly until I found the perfect combinations, and we were done.

 

Or so I thought. As I rolled around on the pouffy new sofa, admiring the pristine but oh-so-bland perfection of the new walls, the omission was obvious. I’d forgotten to hang the pictures. I hate hanging pictures and the very thought of banging nails through my lovely new gib breaks my heart. If you feel the same, and the picture is light, use 3M’s wonderful Command removable adhesive picture hangers. Buy them from any hardware store or supermarket and don’t exceed the recommended weights.

 

If you plan to risk it, however, don’t hang things over chairs. I learned this the hard way when a clock fell on my head. It’s an unavoidable rule of nature – hanging heavy objects will involve either breakage or banging things into studs.

 

And who would know where those pesky studs might be? Don’t search “finding a stud” because anything might appear – just go here. Problem is, when you find the rotten thing, what are the chances it will be where you want to hang your picture? Zero. In which case you may be able to use a gib anchor but, if your art is really heavy, you may just have to hang it wherever the stud is. Clearly if I’d given this any thought at all I would have worked out where I wanted the pictures to go before the walls went up and then instructed the builder accordingly. Yeah right. Next time.

 

And what about grouping pictures? And picture height? Apartment Therapy offers useful tips. Picturehanging.co.nz has advice on how to get it looking professional (apparently string and wire are not good options) and, if you live in Auckland, they will do it for you.

 

Now that makes sense, but it doesn’t solve the problem of what to hang. How to choose from the hundreds of pictures and posters piled around the place from other times, other houses, other countries, other lives? Old family portraits. Flyers from ancient bands. Watercolours from Venice. A signed playbill from a James Brown concert. Architectural plans of lighthouses. A really lovely pair of dye and crayon works my son did when he was three. A Chinese propaganda poster from the Cultural Revolution. Some modern New Zealand artworks.

 

I never want to see any of it again. I want giant wall murals, posters and blinds from SurfaceView. I want the Ford Capri image from their Haynes Manuals collection and a Marvel superhero. Equally desirable are the period photographs from their Victoria & Albert and British National Museum Collections and old masters from the National Gallery collection.

 

I want posters from art.com, where buyers can choose by artist, style, subject, colour and decor style. Very useful for those with no personal style at all.

 

And, for those with no style, no taste and no shame (I admit it, that’s me), mydavinci.com will put your face in an old master. It could be you as the Mona Lisa, or wearing that pearl earring, or standing next to your other half in American Gothic. Now this is art! Go get one.

 

Illustration: Chris Mousdale