# Wandplaner: planning a salon wall to the centimetre > Instagram made me want a salon wall. An hour of prompting made me a planner for it. - Section: Lab - Year: 2026 - Scope: Vanilla JS, SVG, Claude - Web: https://matthiasfritsch.de/lab/wandplaner/ Moving flat does something to your Instagram feed. One week you’re looking at moving boxes, the next your entire feed is interior ideas. I’m in that bubble now. And the bubble has a favourite: the salon wall. ## The bubble You know the look. Frames in different sizes, mixed with things that aren’t frames at all: a plant hanging on the wall, a skateboard deck, a record. It looks random. It isn’t. Every good salon wall is planned to the centimetre, it just pretends not to be. And then there are passepartouts. Nothing is sadder than a nice frame with a print just slapped in cold. A passepartout makes everything a bit more classy. It also makes planning the whole s\*\*\* a lot more complicated, because suddenly every frame has an outer size, a visible size and an opinion. ## Paper? Please. I didn’t plan this on paper, or with masking tape on the wall. Digital native, remember. This is exactly the kind of thing Claude builds really fast, and it did: a few prompts, about an hour, and the first version worked. Then came the part that always takes longer. The good old designer perfectionism. The sideboard had to be in there with its real dimensions, so I could plan around it. The TV had to sit at the right height. The Ambilight needed its breathing room, so no frame gets too close. None of that was necessary. All of it was necessary. Here’s a tiny version of it. Same idea, fewer frames: *[Interactive demo on the website: a mini wall planner. A 600 × 300 cm wall with sideboard and TV, frames with passepartout, a record, a plant ring, a skateboard deck and a mirror. “Surprise me” hangs everything again around the TV, tidy, loose or wild.]* ## What the real one does Spec sheet - Everything to scale, in centimetres - All 52 of my frames in 27 sizes, plus records on 3D-printed holders, plant rings, two skateboard decks, a mirror and a wire shelf - “Surprise me” builds compositions around the TV: tidy, loose or wild - Live checks for overlaps and Ambilight crimes while you drag - A drill plan as a PDF at the end - One HTML file. No build, no dependencies, saved in your browser ## The part Claude came up with Some of it I never asked for. Where exactly the nails go, how high above the top edge, how to hang a skateboard deck with two brackets: Claude interpreted a lot of that on its own. I’m clearly not the first person to build something like this, so it pulled from somewhere. Does the drill plan actually work? Honest answer: I don’t know yet. Ask me again after the drill. ## What went wrong Nothing, so far. Which mostly means the drill hasn’t touched the wall yet. And yes, I’m aware of the irony. In [my portfolio rant](https://matthiasfritsch.de/writing/designer-portfolios/) I make fun of greenfield projects built in an hour. This is one. The difference: it’s for one wall and one user, it has zero governance meetings, and I would never call it a design system. > The best side projects solve a problem nobody else has. Mine is 52 frames and one wall. ## What’s next Big plants on the floor, so the wall and the stuff in front of it can be planned together. Maybe a fancy lava lamp. Why not. *[No image yet. Imagine the finished wall, coming as soon as the drill is charged. The real wall. Placeholder until it’s hung, as always.]* ## Steal it The planner is public. It’s in German, sorry. But German is just English with more consonants, you’ll manage. Option one, for normal people: [open it in the browser](https://matthiasfritsch.github.io/wohnzimmerwandplaner/). Done. Your wall stays in your browser, nothing gets uploaded anywhere. Option two: install it, a guide for dummies 1. Go to the [repo on GitHub](https://github.com/matthiasfritsch/wohnzimmerwandplaner). 2. Click the green “Code” button, then “Download ZIP”. 3. Unzip it. Find `index.html`. Double-click it. 4. There is no step four. No `npm install`, no node_modules black hole, no build that fails on a Friday. Want your own copy online? Fork the repo, then go to Settings → Pages and pick the `main` branch. GitHub hosts it for free. Want it in English? Open `index.html` and ask Claude to translate it. It wrote it, it can deal with it. And if you plan your own wall with it, send me a picture. I’ll show you mine once it’s done.