One picture on the wall this weekend

One piece, one wall, two days. Everything here is a short version of a chapter, with a link to the chapter when you want the reasoning. Nothing in it needs a shop, a saw or a drill press.

This page is for the commonest reason anyone opens a framing guide: one thing you want up, and a bare wall. If you have a box of pictures, a problem with a framed piece, or a wall to fill, the home page routes those elsewhere.

Friday evening: ten minutes

1. Photograph it, front and back. Phone light is fine. If the back shows tape on the piece itself, a stain, flaking, or art stuck to the glass, stop here: that is a conservator's job, and Reading the condition says why.
2. Name what it is made of, and whether you could replace it. A reprintable poster and an original watercolor get different answers to everything below (Telling them apart).
3. Measure the sheet to the sixteenth of an inch, twice, and measure both diagonals. If the diagonals differ by much, the sheet is not square and the job is a framer's (Measuring well enough).

Saturday: the parts

Four decisions, in this order. The size calculator does the arithmetic.

Then the frame, and the one dimension to check before anything else: is the rabbet deep enough? A conservation institute puts a complete package on paper at about 2 cm in total and warns that metal clip-together frames are often not deep enough for mat, backing and glazing together. Put a finger in the rabbet in the shop and measure it (Depth and width first).

Sunday: the wall

Three things, in this order.

1. Rule the wall out, or in. Not a bathroom or kitchen, not an outside wall, not above a fireplace, radiator or vent, and not a wall direct sun reaches. Those cannot be fixed by any frame, and The walls to avoid gives the mechanism for each.
2. Weigh it and choose the fixing. Glass is the mass: a published table puts picture framing glass at 1.2 pounds per square foot. Every anchor maker publishes an ultimate test figure and says to design to about a quarter of it. Weight and hardware does both sums.
3. Mark the hook height. Half the frame's height, minus the drop to the taut wire or D-ring, plus a center height you choose. Then level it, and check it after a week (Hook height and group layout).

What to do on Monday

• Write the row. One line in Your pictures: what it is, its sizes, where it is now. Ten seconds, and it is the thing you will want in three years.
• Put a date in your calendar, a year out, to check the hook and look at the back (The yearly check).
• If the wall gets daylight, measure it once at the brightest hour and run the exposure box. It takes two minutes and it tells you whether this is a wall for this piece or a wall for a copy of it.

What this page is not telling you

Three things, so the shortcuts are visible rather than hidden.

• The eighth-inch overlap is our convention, not a published rule. One maker's published practice is an eighth of an inch per side up to 18 by 24 inches; a conservation institute asks for at least 2 to 4 mm.
• "Acrylic where a fall would reach someone" is our practice. No published figure or size threshold for glazing over a bed, a stair or a child's room was found in this research, and the federal child-safety campaign on wall safety covers furniture and televisions without mentioning pictures or mirrors.
• The center height is a convention with four disagreeing publishers, and the one body publishing guidance of standards character puts the useful band lower, because it is thinking about seated and short viewers. The center line names all of them.