HANGING A SHELF ON PLASTER WALL INSTALL

Your handyman's secret is experience and adaptability, and you need to develop that yourself. You have to learn how different walls are built and how different fittings behave. You can't follow simple repeatable rules. You can't do DIY in an old house the way you can in a new one. I'll assume yours, like mine, has some history to it and has been renovated and altered over the decades. This can be a board of whatever width strikes your fancy, but go for 1/2' thickness as a minimum bite for screws, then just fasten directly to the rail. Either recessed (which requires patching and painting) or surface mounted (less aesthetically pleasing that recessed and can cause problems with the projected reveal off the wall surface).

HANGING A SHELF ON PLASTER WALL INSTALL

In particular, the compressive strength can split the lath and release sizable sections of plaster.Īnother option, is to install a mounting rail between studs. These are not even worth trying, in my opinion. Vinyl (compression) anchors, as you have found out, are in almost every location going to be poorly suited to lath and plaster. Be careful though, your wall will likely support under 50 pounds at each anchor, no matter the anchor's potential maximium.

Big box stores stock these bolts, and you will find options that carry as much as 450lbs load each bolt as fairly commonly available. Ideally you'll want to catch the lath entirely, but that's not always possible with a fat blob of plaster. Once you drill your pilot hole (using an HSS bit, not a concrete bit, and never using hammer drill action), you'll need to do some patient twisting around until you find the flattest orientation available on the backside of your wall. Plaster and lath is really either fasten directly to studs (which can be difficult to locate) or cross your fingers with toggle bolts.įor fastening in the field, your best bet is toggle (or molly) bolts, but the issue is the bulging plaster. What's their secret? I never thought to watch what they do, but they clearly have a simple, reusable system for hanging stuff up on plaster that I'm not aware of. They never, ever have any problems and nothing they've hung up has ever fallen or had any trouble of any kind. This is both expensive and embarrassing (I should be able to hang things on my walls myself!). When I have to hang large objects, I just call a handyman.

I've had problems, too, where I put the drill against the wall, turn it on and only a small crater is created - it doesn't drill through. I've tried using anchors, but the plaster often crumbles when I drill into the wall. I have an electronic studfinder, but (this is probably no surprise to readers here), it doesn't seem to work on my plaster walls. What is the best way to hang heavy objects in plaster?

I have all kinds of trouble hanging things up in the plaster, so I mostly just use 3-M Command strips whenever possible.īut there are a few things that are too heavy for Command strips, like very heavy mirrors or shelving. I live in an old house (about 90 years old) with plaster walls.

Hanging a shelf on plaster wall