Ted and I had to clear our walls for the painters in Fall 2022. We were both tired of looking at the same old things on the walls, so we decided that we would only re-hang the things we missed looking at. One of the things we missed looking at was a two-piece sculpture. It’s not an easy thing to hang. The two pieces need to be properly aligned; they are heavy and awkward to handle; and the design pieces have sharp corners. An added challenge is that it needs to be hung on eight irregularly arranged hangers.

I decided that a template would probably avoid repeated trial-and-error efforts, so we spread some large, taped-together sheets of paper on the basement floor and properly aligned the sculpture pieces on them. Then we marked where the irregular hangers were so we’d know where to put the nails into the wall. The hangers are welded to the sculpture frame, but the frame does not extend to the edges of the sculpture. That provided another challenge: deciding where to place the template on the wall so that the sculpture would hang where we wanted it to be. We worked with the outside measurements of the sculpture and the template to determine the center, transferred those measurements to the wall, and then taped the template to the wall.

Instead of pounding the nails all the way in on the template markings, I tapped them just hard enough to make a visible dent in the drywall. Then we removed the template and put in four of the eight nails we needed–just enough to hold the sculpture temporarily–before hanging the sculpture to check its placement. It looked good, so we took it down and hammered in the other four nails. Now the sculpture is securely hung and the placement looks good. Nice work, if I do say so myself.