Let's say you want to hang a painting in your new house somewhere in the USA, Canada
or other "modern" countries. You examine the painting for the type of hanger it requires, say it's a simple ^^^^^ metal piece expecting a small nail head to retain it at some spot on your beautiful wall. You obtain a nail that HAS a head of sufficient length to engage the material the wall is made (say dry wall...er plasterboard or lath and plaster) of or use a stud finder or magnetic device
to find a wooden stud at a close enough location to where you want the painting exhibited to nail to. Then you pound in the nail leaving enough length to engage the hanger device or wire on the back of the painting. Easy enough huh? You could even go another step and use a small molly (plastic/metal) to install a small screw into for that deluxe job. That's there...where you ARE or WERE once. I live HERE, my house is HERE and the walls involved are HERE too. They are of two broad types, not even distantly related to each other, 2 - 3 feet thick od either SOLID limestone/marble cut from a quarry or from some castle, castle wall, fallen down barn or house or whatever. It is NOT hollow, it is SOLID, VERY solid. Sometimes this type is coverred over with a layer of lime and horsehair, applied up to an inch thick to fill irregularities in the pierres (stones), this type is quite old and therefore fragile at times, very fragile. Regular quicklime plaster is used as well when they ran out of horses. Often the ceilings are the horsehair variety installed over a lath-like assemblage...but that's ceilings, we are stuck at the wall painting hanging business right now, why did you try to distract me? Another type of wall is
stone and mud/sand coverred with crepie...lime mixed with sand. It can also find itself coverred with the horsehair mix or plaster. No matter...any attempt to NAIL into the stone wall under the horsehair stuff will result in a bent nail, fractured horsehair/plaster and a damaged thumb. You must either relocate the offending nail to a less solid place (like your skull) or grab a hammer drill, drill a 1/4" hole using a carbide tipped drill, install a molly of plastic or metal then screw in a nice screw. In the stone/mud wall with horsehair covering you can do a similar thing with a chance that you might actually find a spot in the mud that is hard enough that a molly with be able to be glued to the hole, left to cure, then screwed into.
Mollys rule here. Then there's the roman brick wall with horsehair/plaster or just plaster...you know it because it rains red dust when you try to drill the molly's hole and hit a brick that is in mid self-destruction, you see these roman bricks can be damned near glass-like or simply MUD that was never fired in a kiln at all or for a time not to exceed 10 minutes. It could be dried horse shit for all it matters because no molly made will be glued or otherwise attached to this crap. It falls apart if touched. Solution? Move the molly's location and try, try again, maybe this new one will have a half-hard one to fasten to. Then there are the famous HOLLOW brick walls...the brick is actually hollow...it's lightweight so eacy to assemble upstairs somewhere and is THIN...like 2 inches thin. That's the hint you needed. Small molly's CAN be attached, nails do NOT work unless they are very small and won't hold your painting. The problem here is that when you drill for a moilly to this the drill drills right thru the hollow brick to the hollow place inside and strikes nothing. The thickness may or may not be thick enough to set in a molly at all...now you wisely go to the spring loaded molly for hollow walls and do that knowing it is a one time shot at getting the depth right and you cannot remove the molly to adjust it in anyway once it has been insewrted into the wall or the little sping wing thingie will drop to the inside of the hollow brick never to be seen again, get another molly. Those with wood walls, I applaud your good common sense.
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