We bought our house three years ago, and we’ve almost finished painting every room (one left to go). One thing I absolutely HATE doing is wrecking a freshly-painted wall by putting a hole in it, which is why I love 3M’s Command Brand Strips. I’m also amazed by how many people don’t know these exist, so hopefully some people will discover their awesomeness through this blog post.

Before the house we were in a condo, and for many, many years my walls were completely bare, not because I didn’t want to hang things on them, but because I didn’t want to have to patch holes when it came time to sell the place. That’s when I discovered the Command Strips while walking through Home Depot one day. Like all 3M products, once you see it you wonder how you ever lived without it. The strips are sticky on both sides, but can be removed by pulling on a tab. This stretches the sticky material over a greater distance and causes it to lose it’s sticky property. Whatever you used the strip to stick to the wall is now free to be removed. Awesome!

There are tons of products, from simply sticky strips to use with posters, to velcro strips, to picture hangers, to hooks, and even strips to use in the washroom. Since moving in we’ve only put 4 holes in the wall to hang something, and they were to hang two large mirrors. I thought it may be fun to show off a couple of places in the house that we’ve utilized the Command Strips, but these are certainly not ALL the places we use them.

Plates on the wall

These are hung with small Command Strips and plate holders. I know Kat will change her mind on the design sometime down the road, so this allows her to change the pattern without hassle.

Photos on the living room wall

Much like the plates in the kitchen, I expect this design will change sometime soon. We used a number of different strips for this, but most of them were the velcro strips, or picture hanging strips. There may have been another one, but I don’t want to take them off the wall to check.

Organizing the closet

Kat wanted a place to keep her scarfs gloves, and hats, so I devised a way to mount this wire grill without putting holes. I used two medium hooks at the top of the wire grill, and it’s been solid for over a year.

A wrapping paper storage solution

This came out of the project above, and a need to organize our wrapping paper. I realized that I could mount this to the door and have easy access to wrapping supplies instead of digging around the storage room. Because of the weight of the wire grill, and the paper, I used 4 medium strips for this, with one in each of the four corners, then four small hooks for the elastic that keeps the paper from falling over. This has made it MUCH easier to quickly pull out some wrapping paper when we need it, and I’m happy it’s utilizing the space better than before.

Next time you want to hang something, avoid putting another hole in the wall and use one of the Command Strips. You can easily hang pictures on your walls, but you can see they can serve other purposes as well. You can find them at Home Depot, Michaels, London Drugs, and many other stores.