Calendar Hangers

It's the end of May and I'm just realizing what a great calendar hanging system we have in our home. My boyfriend is a genius. Actually, he's just way more stubborn, a little bit less lazy and as equally committed to not doing things the proper way as I am. My boyfriend's birthday is December 31st and I got him a calendar. So, when it came time to hang up said calendar - the day after his birthday - he created this new system.

The system is pretty simple and was born out of the frustration of having the calendar fall down all the time, the difficulty in changing the pages of the month, and the unsightliness of the previous calendar hanging arrangements. In the past we had tried to hang the calendar with a push pin, but that meant you had to pull out the tack and put it back in every month - or more often if you wanted to look back at a previous month. This led to the calendar falling because the hole eventually got too big to continue to hold the push pin. We had also tried several different hook things but they also fell out after time. Finally, somebody did something about it.

My boyfriend got a generic plastic wall anchor and a screw that was a little bit smaller than the one meant to go in the anchor. He hammered in the anchor and then used the screw to hang the calendar. Because the screw is a bit too small for the anchor, you don't need a screwdriver to get it in or out when you change the months, yet the anchor holds it in place.

The design is very simple and clean, but if you wanted and were less lazy than my boyfriend and me, you could glue a little something - like a button or rhinestone - to the end of the screw to make it less utilitarian. Or, you can use a screw with a funky top since you don't need a tool to get it in and out. There are really a lot of things you could do with this system...

- Each year, customize your screw to match your calendar. For instance, if you have a calendar of beach scenes, you could glue a shell onto your screw.
- Get 4 screws. Glue a flower on one, a sun on another, a leaf on the next, and a snowflake on the last. Now you have a different screw for each season.
- Get lots of screws and make a different one for each month. You can go with a theme like birthstones.
- Get lots of screws and personalize some for different months. Like, for a month that has a family member's birthday, you could use a cake.

Plastic anchors and screws as calendar hooks - a simple triumph!

UPDATE - January 28, 2014
In January 2010, we moved.  We now use a cup hook as our calendar hanging system.  It is also a simple triumph!