How to Hang a Consistent Centerline with an Uneven Floor, Lasers of Course!

It doesn’t matter how new your building is, the floor will be uneven from one side of the room to the other. Those of us who work with historic homes or building really understand this issue. Instead of measuring up form the floor for each and every piece we hang, we first set up our tripod and mount our laser level. First we make the level itself label using a small torpedo level and we let the laser level itself finish the job as it has a self leveling option, it can balance itself with 2 degrees of play. Next we raise the tripod up and down to get the laser to our 58″ center line and go to opposite ends of the room to take measurements to see how close we are. If the difference is vast we may consider moving the tripod a little up or down to divide the difference in height. For instance, if one side of the room is reading 58″ and the other side of the room id 57 1/2″ we may lower the line to 57 3/4″.

When working in really large spaces we don’t try to average across the whole room, in many cases our movable walls would prevent the laser from getting over there anyway. We divide the room into discrete quadrants and perform the steps above for each “room”. We are careful to make the space where one room ends and one room begins as close to the same height as possible as you would likely be seeing these two spaces in the same line of sight, you’ll want them to be as consistent as possible.

Next we go around the room placing blue tape on the underside of the line. You’ll notice that there is one for either side of each work of art. In this case the room has already been spaced out and know where the works will fall on the wall. These marks will then asset us in putting up hooks as we just measure up from the blue tape instead of adding 58″ to our fractional arithmetic. The tape is left behind to assist in installing the labels, we install ours with a 57″ top edge (for single labels).

There are many types of lasers with either a singular purpose or ones that have a range of capabilities, pick the one that servers all your needs. Ours is the Bosch GLL2-80 and most laser levels will screw onto a standard tripod mount. Keep in mind some of the other jobs these are good for, like lining up movable walls so they are in the same plane, our laser marks a long line on the floor. Other lasers will shoot a pinpoint from the floor to the ceiling.  It’s a nice option when looking to install something in the ceiling at just the right spot; things light motion detectors or projectors. Ours doesn’t do that, we we can eventually get it do do something similar. There are probably a lot of other things they can do, does anyone have something to add to this list?