Your wall
One wall seen face on, drawn to scale, with every frame placed on it at true proportion. Set a center height and a furniture line, measure between any two things, keep more than one arrangement, and print the one you choose at scale.
Optional for one picture, and the point of the chapter for a group. Draw the wall you will change first: its width, its height, and anything fixed on it. A reader who works on paper instead loses nothing in principle, because quarter-inch graph paper at one square to the inch does the same job; what the plan adds is that the arithmetic is already right, that you can keep more than one arrangement side by side, and that the drawing is stored and printed with the rest of your records. The floor-layout step in Planning the wall is still worth doing either way.
How to use the plan
- Measure first, in this order: the wall's width and height; the height of the top of whatever stands under it; the width of that furniture; and the outside width and height of each frame. The last of those comes in automatically from the frame width and frame height columns of Your pictures.
- Set the two guide lines. The center height is the one the whole group works to, and Height explains why it is yours to choose rather than a rule. The furniture top line is there so the gap above a sofa or a console is a measurement rather than a guess.
- Place, then measure. Drag a picture, or select it with Tab and use the arrow keys; R turns it. Then add measurements between the things whose relationship you actually care about: frame to frame for the gap, bottom row to the furniture line, and the group's outer edges to the ends of the wall.
- Keep more than one arrangement. Copy the option before you change it. Comparing two drawings is the whole value of drawing it, and it is the thing a pencil sketch does badly.
- Check three things once it is drawn: that one gap figure is used everywhere, that the block's center sits where you meant it to, and that nothing overlaps a fixed feature such as a switch, an outlet or a mantel.
- Print at scale and check the bar. The printed sheet states the scale bar's true length; measure it with a ruler before you trust a print.
The example is the Okonkwos' sofa wall, invented: a 12 foot 6 inch wall, 8 feet high, with an outlet near the left end, a center height line at 58 inches and a furniture top line at 34 inches for the back of a 7 foot sofa. Option A puts fourteen 16 by 20 inch frames in two rows of seven, which comes out 130 inches wide and leaves 10 inches of wall at each end. Option B drops to twelve in two rows of six, at 111 inches. Both have 3 inch gaps and both clear the sofa back by 2 1/2 inches. The pair shows what the plan is for: the difference between them is obvious on the drawing and invisible in a description.
This is a scaled drawing, not an opinion. It cannot tell you whether an arrangement looks right, which standing in the room settles; it does not know what is behind the wall, which Which wall is it covers; and it says nothing about what will hold each frame, which is chosen from that frame's own weight against a published rating in Hardware by published rating. The spacing default is ours and not anyone's published figure. Nothing drawn here goes into a link: the share link carries your setup only, so on another device the plan starts from the setup or comes over in an export.