Measuring a wall before you hang anything

Almost every badly hung picture in a house is hung too high. The eye expects the centre of a picture to sit at standing eye level, which for most rooms works out somewhere between 145 and 155 centimetres from the floor, and a picture hung above that line reads as floating.

The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope. Take the height of the frame and halve it. Add the number you want for the centre line. Then subtract the drop, which is the distance from the top edge of the frame down to the taut hanging wire or the hook plate. The result is where the nail goes.

Working over furniture

A picture hung above a sideboard or a sofa belongs to that piece of furniture, not to the room, so the eye-level rule loosens. Leave a gap of roughly 15 to 25 centimetres between the top of the furniture and the bottom of the frame. Much more and the two objects stop looking related. Much less and the frame looks like it is resting on the furniture.

Width matters as much as height. A frame that spans somewhere between half and two thirds of the furniture below it sits comfortably. A narrow frame centred over a long sideboard looks stranded, which is the usual argument for hanging a group instead of a single piece.

What the wall is made of

Find out before you drill. On plasterboard, a small frame will hold on a picture hook pinned at an angle, and anything heavier wants a proper cavity fixing or a fixing into the stud behind. On old lath and plaster, drill slowly and expect the bit to break through into a void. On solid masonry, a plugged screw is the whole answer.

One habit saves a lot of filler: mark the spot with a pencil cross, hold the frame up against it, and look at it from the doorway before anything sharp touches the wall. The doorway view is the one people actually see.