The Easy Way To Hang Plates on a Wall


I’ve always admired gallery walls filled with hanging plates. Whether it be in a kitchen, dining room, or even a hallway, I’ve really loved the 3-dimensional look it can bring to vertical space. But I have never actually tackled my own plate wall, specifically because it intimidated the heck out of me.

How do you get the plates to hang so perfectly? How do they not crash down to the ground? How do you make sure they’re up there and secure? Ahhh…so much intimidation.

But I recently got over my plate hanging fear and tackled a mini plate wall in our kitchen. Not only did I live to tell the tale…but I found the absolute easiest way to hang lightweight plates. Like seriously…so easy and you don’t even need to spend any extra cash on plate hanging hooks.

See, I was itching to change-up the “art” in our kitchen. We have zero kitchen wall space, except for right behind our sink area…Seafood-SignSince we moved in, we’ve had this little Seafood Special board that the Mr. really loved. We found it at World Market awhile back, and we thought it added some nautical charm to the kitchen. But I was ready to change things up and try something new, so down came the seafood. (don’t worry, it still has a home in our office!)

At that time I headed to our local Goodwill in search of some lightweight, white plates in a variety of sizes. $4.50 later and I came home with the following loot…Plate-Wall-Laid-OutA mini collection of white plates! I measured out the area above the sink and created a mock set up on the floor with painter’s tape. This allowed me to move my plates around until I came up with a grouping that I liked.

So I had the plates and I knew how I wanted them to look on the wall…but I still had absolutely no idea how I was going to actually hang them up. After a bit of research, I came across this method from a fellow blogger, Kelly from View Along the Way. Her method seemed oh-so-easy, and I already had all of the supplies on-hand. I figured I needed to give it a shot before I visited the store to actually purchase plate hanging disks.

Here’s the method that Kelly recommended…Hot-Glue-GunI got out some thick paper (I used cardstock, but you could even use cardboard), my zebra hot glue gun, and some thumb tacks (I had a million leftover from this project, so I was eager to put them to good use). Gluing-BackI folded the card stock a couple of times to make it a bit thicker, and I used my hot glue gun to secure 80% of it to the plate.ย  I then left approximately 2 inches unglued at the top, and let the glue dry. After a couple of minutes I tugged at the paper and felt that it was secure on the plate.

Tack-Thru-BackingNext, I took a thumb tack and poked it through the unattached portion of the paper at the top.

Rookie Tip: I eventually found that it was easiest to put the thumb tack through the paper before gluing the paper to the plate. See what works best for you, but this seemed to make the process flow a little more smoothly for me.

I did this for each plate, until they were all dry and ready to hang. Then I simply pushed my plates on the wall and secured them with the thumb tacks. Plate-Accent-WallNow instead of a ton of huge nail holes, I only have small holes from the tacks. Plus, this method made it really easy to hang them up. I didn’t measure a thing..instead I just eye-balled it and firmly pressed the plate into place when I liked the way it looked.

Now I’ll warn you that you shouldn’t try this method if you have heavy plates. Instead, you should shell out the extra cash and actually buy the plate hanging disks from a craft store. But the thumb tack trick should definitely work for lightweight plates. Kitchen-NookPlus, as I said before these plates only cost me $4.50 total. So if one of them does break (which I’m not anticipating..but you never know!), it won’t be the end of the world.

Sink-Area-White-PlatesI really like the new addition to our kitchen. The pops of white look very clean and simple, and it was fun to tackle a DIY that has been intimidating me for some time now.

Now I just need to make sure Finn doesn’t take a plate down and eat off of it. He says it is very tempting…

Casey

 


The Year of Casey

Hey there!

Iโ€™m Casey Finn, the voice behind The DIY Playbook. I’m a Chicago gal teaching you how to design, DIY, and maintain your home…by yourself! Learn more about me right here.