I wanted to share my newfound knowledge with you. It’s nothing profound, really, but it is rather useful. What is this knowledge of which I speak? Well, it’s how to hang things from your walls and ceilings.
Now, we live in a townhouse that has metal studs. This might not seem like a problem, but it has stymied us for years. You can get stud finders that will find your wooden studs when you run them across a wall – they beep. Then you can insert screws directly into the drywall at that location and it makes it simple to hang a picture without turning your drywall into a messy pulp.
Our house is a little more difficult to manage. At our house, we use a magnet but even the magnet rarely sticks to the walls. I’m beginning to think that our house doesn’t actually have any studs at all, metal or otherwise. Anyway, I digress.
I’ve found a couple of wonderful ways to hang things off the walls and ceilings in spite of our lack of wood in the walls. In the ceilings, we use toggle bolts. These fabulous little items are screws that you place into the ceiling. Once inside your ceiling, an attachment comes out of the end of the bolt and flies open, making a “T” shape inside the ceiling. The bolt hangs off itself, spreading its weight across the inside of the drywall ceiling. This allows you to hang heavier items from the ceiling.
The other gadget is Lee Valley Tools’ Hangman. I’m not sure if other places also sell this device, but it is an excellent way to disperse the weight of a large object across a wall. Screw a 12 or 18-inch bar into the back of your picture, then screw a 12 or 18-inch bar into your wall with the special screws. Slide the picture bar over the wall bar, and you have an interlocking mechanism that keeps your heavy pictures secure, no metal wires necessary.
Do you have any simple household fixer-upper hints to share? What tiny gadgets have rocked your world?
(Image courtesy of whitebeard at stock exchange)