June 24th, 2022

Well dang, another one bites the dust.   Add this to our slowly growing collection of broken picture frames. 

I don't know if you remember, back about 4 or 5 ago, I was so excited to write about these picture hanging command strips that Tim found.  We used them to hang art all over the house.  All sorts of art and all sorts of sizes.  As long as we stayed within the weight limit clearly indicated on each particular size of command strips it worked beautifully!   And not one single nail had to hammered.

I try to avoid using hammer and nails to hang pictures. Mostly because I'm really bad at it.    And we have a lot of art. So imagine every wall in your house with nail hole after nail hole (because I measured incorrectly the first and sometimes second time) and a few ooopses where the hammer slipped and hit the hall instead of the nail.  Yeah. It's not pretty. 

Initially, I avoided hanging any art at all in this house just to avoid having spackle and mesh and paint repairs to do.  (If I don't damage it, I don't have to fix it)  But the walls looked naked and the art was languishing in boxes in the utility room taking up space.  I'm not sure which was more bothersome to be honest, the naked walls or the art taking up valuable space.  After about a year I was thinking that if we weren't going to use our art, we should probably just get rid of it.  

While it was a logical thought, it was a sad one.  We love every single piece of art that we have.  And we have a lot.  More than there is actually room to hang up.    Some pieces were gifts, others we purchased and some were inherited.  There are oils and water colours and photographs (none of mine) and pen & ink and a few are just prints that we loved.  About half of them are beautifully and professionally framed the rest are Sam-Framed from cheapo frames bought on sale at Michaels and Walmart.

By the way, gravity does not care one single bit if a frame is wildly expensive or really cheap.  When the command strip lets go and the piece hits the tile, the frame breaks.  Dang it.  And obviously,  so does the glass.  Sigh.

99% of the art went up in the same few consecutive weekends.  Some of it crashed back down to the ground fairly quickly.  Those, I attribute to an operator (that would be me) error issue.  Either I didn't guess the weight correctly (very possible) or I didn't follow the directions 100 percent correctly (even more probable).    Those we reframed or repaired and rehung right away.  And for awhile, it looked so great!  The artwork that we loved looked back at us in nearly every direction from nearly every room.  Yayayayayay!

But now, every once in awhile, with no forewarning at all, one of them leaps from the wall to it's death.    And it's so random!  There seems to be no rhythm or rhyme to it at all.  One giant one in the kitchen crashed to the ground around Christmas time two years ago. A beautiful painting in the living room that was a cherished gift  fell last autumn  just a few weeks after an inherited picture of an old barn ended itself in the guest room.  Then nothing else until  the cat picture (which was my mother's) yesterday.  I just don't get it.

Other works have been hanging just as long all over the house and remain - apparently safe and secure.  They were all hung the same way using the same product in the same general time period.  Yet this one falls and that one does not.  The living painting that jumped off the wall was one of six pieces in a group.  Five remain.  I do not understand.

And I keep debating with myself.  Should I just preemptively take down all of the art so no more frames are broken and I don't have to endlessly sweep up glass?  We would be back to naked walls again but at least the art would be saved.  But on the other hand, what if the remaining pieces were never going to fall? What if everything else is as immovable as granite exactly as it is?   Decisions decisions decisions.

Eventually, I will have all of the broken stuff reframed - whether I pop for some cheapo sale frames myself again or have it done properly by people who actually know what they are doing.  And then I will have to make yet another decision, do I use command strip picture hangars again?  Or do I risk using actual nails?  

I am positive that I did not see an expiration date on any of the command strip picture hangar packages.  Positive.  However, I admit that I did not do any research, which is unlike me.  I guess that would be step one.  But it would be silly to have an expiration date on a picture hangar product wouldn't it?  Yes you can use our product to hang your pictures but only temporarily. 

Once I have pictures hung up, there they stay (usually) until the end of time.  Or until we move.  I don't re-decorate. Once it's done, it's done.  Why?  Well as we all know, I am seriously tight with a buck.  Decorating is expensive!  Re-decorating seems like an unnecessary expense to me (to me!  This is just me talking about me)  As long as something still works it stays.  However, the instant that it no longer works, it's outta here and replaced.  If a table breaks, it's gone.  On the other hand, if it only has a scratch a chip or a worn area I call it "character" and it stays.  

So there you have it.   That's the story for today.  The mysterious falling artwork.  Maybe we have a poltergeist?