Picture & Art Hanging near you

Lath and plaster is the surface that catches people out. It is a coat of lime plaster pressed through thin timber laths, it is often more than a century old, and it has no useful tensile strength. A masonry bit spinning in it will blow out a saucer-sized hole, and a plug will spin. The reliable answers are a fine pin hook, which splits rather than crushes the plaster, or a screw into the timber stud behind, found by probing rather than by detector alone.

Solid lime-plastered masonry behaves better but hides a second problem: the plaster may be 20mm or more thick, so a short plug ends up entirely in the plaster rather than in the brick, and works loose over a year. Drill deep enough to seat the plug in the masonry, and expect to blow the dust out of the hole before the plug goes in.

Picture rails, where an original one survives, are the easiest wall in the house and the most forgiving. They were installed precisely so that pictures could be moved without touching the plaster, they are fixed back to studs or grounds, and hanging from them leaves the wall untouched - which is exactly what you want in a listed interior or a flat you do not own.

Listed building consent bites on the interior. Section 7 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 prohibits executing works for the alteration of a listed building in any manner that would affect its character as a building of special architectural or historic interest unless the works are authorised, and section 9 makes doing so an offence. Drilling a modern plasterboard partition in a listed house may well be unremarkable; drilling through original panelling, a decorative plaster cornice or a chimneypiece is a different question, and the person to ask is the conservation officer at your local planning authority, before the work rather than after it.

Conservation area designation, by contrast, is mostly about what can be seen from outside, so it rarely affects hanging a picture indoors. Leasehold is where most flat-dwellers actually meet a restriction: the lease will typically require the landlord's written consent for alterations, and many leases treat fixings into structural or party walls as alterations. Section 19(2) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 provides that where a lease contains a covenant against making improvements without licence or consent, that consent is not to be unreasonably withheld, but it also allows the landlord to require a reasonable sum in respect of legal or other expenses properly incurred in granting it.

None of that is a reason to leave the walls bare. It is a reason to ask first, to prefer picture rails, cleats and reversible fixings in a building that is protected or not yours, and to keep any consent in writing with the rest of the property papers.

Blown plaster is the usual damage. A fixing placed in old plaster that has lost its key to the masonry behind takes a patch of plaster with it, and the repair is bigger than the hole: the loose area has to be cut back to sound material before it can be made good, and the new patch will need painting to a natural break rather than dabbed in. It is the same repair described in the minor plasterboard and plaster repair guide, and the reason the two jobs are often booked together.

The second is a fixing that has landed somewhere it should not - a cable, a central heating pipe, or a flue liner in a chimney breast. Pipework in particular tends to run vertically to a radiator and horizontally under a first-floor room, and a self-tapping screw through copper can leak for weeks before it shows on a ceiling below.

The third is simply too many holes. Repositioning a group twice leaves a wall that reads as damaged once the light rakes across it in the evening. Templates cost nothing and are the difference between one set of holes and three.

This is time-based work, and the time depends on the number of pieces, how heavy the heaviest one is, what the walls are made of, whether a group needs setting out, whether any piece is going over a stairwell or another awkward spot, and whether the house is listed or the flat leasehold so that reversible fixings are called for. A single canvas on a modern partition is minutes; forty frames in a hallway gallery, half of them on lath and plaster, is a day with a level and a lot of paper templates.

What LokalMatch does is put the request in front of people who do this work. Write down what you have, roughly how heavy, and what the walls are, add the postcode, and local handyman and picture-hanging businesses respond to you directly. There is no charge to homeowners - the pros pay for the enquiries they receive. LokalMatch does not hang anything, does not set the price and does not vet, rank or endorse the businesses that get in touch, so references and insurance remain worth checking yourself.