“I mean, give me any tool and I’m in trouble. I have yet to learn the mysteries of a screwdriver. My wife and daughter would go hide when I’d start to hang a painting.” –Chuck Jones

Chuck Jones, most popularly known for his creation of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, astutely judged his ability with hammer and nail.  Turns out most people are in the same league with Chuck when it comes to hanging paintings on a wall.  I don’t know how many open houses I’ve walked into that I immediately knew at least one person of at least 6′ in height must live there.  Every painting, picture, and poster seemed as if it was personally hung to accentuate the fact that my mere 5′2″ puts me forehead height with the bottom of the frame.  What should have been a complement to the home became an Alice in Wonderland-esque distraction. 

Don’t think, though, that because I’m short I am immune to this problem.  In 1995, when it can time to sell our first home, a quaint cape in the South Hull District in Montgomery, Alabama, Wilson and I contacted Sandra Nickel, one of the top producing agents in Montgomery.  She deployed her staging assistant, who took one look at our walls, and said “where’s your hammer?”  She lowered every one of our pictures by six inches.  The house sold in three weeks!

How To Hang ‘Em

Art galleries hang paintings such that the viewer is slightly looking down at them.  Generally, hanging pictures at a 57-inch centerline should be appropriate.  To do this, measure 57 inches straight up the length of the wall from the floor and mark this point.  Hang your painting so that the centerline of the painting is aligned with this mark.  Measure from the middle of the picture to the top of the stretched picture wire or the picture hooks and add this measurement to the 57 inches to come up with the total distance from the floor at which you should hammer the nail.  That’s it.

Beyond that, get creative…  Michael’s Arts and Crafts provides nice suggestions for clustering paintings and other artwork.

Well hung paintings won’t sell a house; but they will help prospective buyers focus on the what’s really important–the house itself!

Joyce Munro is co-owner, with her husband Wilson, of The Open Look a free tool to post and search open houses in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and the Triangle area of North Carolina. They formed their company in 2006 following their inability to efficiently identify and locate open houses in the Triangle area when they relocated from Lexington, MA. They reside in Cary, NC.