So there’s this upstairs area in our new house that we’ve been having a hard time figuring out how to use. It’s a dead end hallway at the top of the stairs. We considered putting a couch there, but it basically would just be for looks.

The other day Susan was watching television and saw these guitar wall hangers on one of those home decorating shows. “That’s what we should do,” she said. “Let’s turn it into a display wall for your guitars!”

Susan spent a few minutes taping off the wall. We knew we wanted to paint the wall to make it stand out as a focal point, but were originally undecided on the color. I knew the color I wanted in my head, but I couldn’t find it. It was red with a hint of orange in it.

Susan eventually found the color, ironically named “tomato”. I hate tomatoes, but I sure liked this color! The paint went on rather orange, but darkened up quite a bit after it dried.

By the next (this) morning, the paint had fully dried. The next step involved lying all my guitars down on the carpet and figuring out how far apart the holders should be. We decided on 2′ apart with a staggered height of 18″. I ordered the black metal guitar hangers off for $8/each off of Amazon.com.

Here’s a shot of the wall from the upstairs den. As you can see the wall nearly glows. It’s not quite as orange as it appears in this picture.

Here’s the wall with all the guitars hung and a couple of bean bags thrown in for good measure. None of my guitars are particularly worth anything, but this is a nice, out of the way place to hang them. At the old house they were either on stands and always in the way, or shoved to the back of a closet.

Above is how the wall looks from the stairs, and below …

… is how they look from the living room below. Once again, Susan’s idea turned out to be a great one!