🪵♻️🖼️ We Made a Poster Hanger From Construction Scrap

These pieces of wood were used as spacers when our sidewalk was built. Once the paving work was finished, they were basically scrap.

I kept them; and eventually my kids and I turned them into simple wooden poster hangers for their room.

We wanted a way to hang large posters without putting them into heavy frames. The solution is deliberately simple: reclaimed wood, a few brass threaded inserts, screws and some wire.

We cut the wood by hand, planed the visible surfaces, sanded everything smooth, drilled the holes and assembled the rails.

There is nothing particularly complicated about this project. That's actually what I like about it. We took something that was going to be thrown away and turned it into something useful together.

The same design can be adapted to almost any poster size — just change the length of the wooden rails.

A small project, made from leftover material, together with my two favourite little makers.

Materials

1. Reclaimed wooden strips / construction scrap
2. Brass threaded inserts (4 mm inside, 5 mm outside x 8 mm)
3. Matching screws (4 mm x 15 mm)
4. Thin wire or picture-hanging wire
5. Sandpaper (80 and 120 grit)
6. Optional: wood oil or finish

Tools

1. Japanese handsaw
2. Japanese handplane
3. Drill
4. Drill bits
5. Screwdriver
6. Clamps
7. Sanding block

These wooden strips originally had a completely different job.

When the paving slabs for our sidewalk were installed, they were used as spacers to keep the slabs at the correct distance.

After the construction work was finished, the spacers were no longer needed and would have been thrown away.

I kept a few pieces because the dimensions looked perfect for a small woodworking project.

A few months later, we found a new purpose for them.

We started by cutting the pieces to the required length by hand. We decided on a width of 60 cm, which is large enough to comfortably hold even DIN A2 posters.

The visible surfaces were then planed and sanded. I kept the shape and character of the original wood rather than trying to make it look like new lumber.

The nice thing about this project is that there is no need for perfectly prepared furniture-grade material. The wood already had a second life before we started.

To connect the rails, I used small brass threaded inserts.

First, I drilled the holes through both rails to get the positioning exactly right. I then enlarged the holes in the back rail of each pair to the correct diameter for the brass threaded inserts and installed them into the wood. The screws can now be removed and reinstalled without repeatedly cutting a new thread directly into the wood.

Once the rails were prepared, assembly was very straightforward.

The poster is simply placed between the upper and lower wooden rails and the screws are tightened. A piece of thin wire (or threat) is attached to the upper rail provides the hanging point.

No frame, no glass and no complicated mechanism.

The finished hangers are light and can be made to fit different poster sizes.

We made two different versions for two very different posters: a large Moon poster and a dinosaur poster.

Changing the size is simply a matter of cutting the wooden rails to match the width of the poster.

And that's it. What started as construction-site scrap is now hanging on the wall in the kids' room.

It was a very quick project, but probably one of the most satisfying ones — partly because we made it together.

And the best part: the next time I find some interesting pieces of scrap wood, I already know what I can do with them.