When you live in a rented flat or house, you are always at the mercy of your landlord's rules and expectation, and sometimes it could mean not having the right to drill any holes in your wall to hang pictures. It's something that could seriously impede your ability to turn your rental property into a home that reflects your personality.
Fortunately, there are ways around draconian landlord rules, and not only are those rental friendly, they are also a wonderful way to decorate your wall if you just plain hate drilling holes every time you want to change your home decor. I've got 2 words for you : command strips (Amazon affiliate link).
I lived my entire life in rental properties so far, and in all that time I only had one landlord who included a 'no holes in walls" clause to the lease agreement, if I remember correctly he also was against using scotch tape on the wall, but turns out he wasn't too strict about that and we stayed years in that flat and he also ended up having no problem with a few holes here and there. In the flat we currently live in, we have no holes restrictions, other than my finding it a pain in the behind to call a handyman each time I want to hang a new picture, and abide by the homeowner association's rules about timings for noisy work. A few of my paintings, namely the ones we had when we first moved in are held with screws in the wall, but a few years ago I discovered command strips and there was no turning back.
When I decided to make a gallery wall with some of my mint and pink illustrations a few months ago, I knew the hardest part would be to choose which artwork I wanted up on that wall. The whole part of putting them up took just a few minutes per canvas print.
To make sure you end up with a balanced, harmonious gallery wall I HIGHLY recommend that you create a mockup with kraft paper to decide where everything should go. To do so, simply trace the size of your pictures, frames or canvas on a kraft paper roll and cut each of them out. Then using masking tape or washi tape, stick those mockup shapes to your wall so that you get an idea of how each picture will look.
If you aren't sure you are going to remember which kraft square correspond to what, just write the description or name of the artwork on the square.
Once your kraft paper squares are in place and you are satisfied with the placement of each of them, take a light pencil and mark the corners of each of them onto the wall. DO NOT remove the paper squares just yet!
Following the instructions on the command strips pack, stick them to the back of your frames or canvas and then, one artwork at a time, place them on the wall. To do so, remove the corresponding kraft paper square and line the two top corners of your artwork with the lines you traced on the wall and press the frame against the wall so that the command strip adhesive gets to work its magic. Repeat the process for each and every frame or canvas that needs to go up.
Command strip can be removed off the wall without leaving a trace if you follow the removal instructions, which is to pull down on the little tag at the bottom of the strip. Since the pictures are held to the wall with a velcro system between the wall and the frame strip, you also have the option of removing one canvas and swapping it for another by simply sticking a set of strip to the new canvas and placing it on the old strips on the wall. That method would only really work if you swap two canvas of the same size.
The most important thing with command strips is to choose one that can bear the weight of your frame, so do pay attention to the weight bearing capacity of each sizes of strips in the range. In the pictures above, I used medium strips on each of those 12x12 inches canvas squares. I used 2 strips set per artwork. It's probably a tad overkill in this case and I could have done it small strips but I liked the idea of the canvas being hooked to the wall on a larger surface of strip. This post contains Amazon affiliate links, this means if you click on any of the links above and make a purchase, I'll get paid a commission at no extra cost to you.
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