Fixing things to a wall without guessing

The wall decides, not the hook

Almost everything sold in this department is chosen the wrong way round. A person picks the hook, the bracket or the mirror clip first, because that is the part that shows, and then discovers at the last moment what is behind the plaster. The order that works is the other one. Find out what the wall is made of, then buy the fixing that suits it, then buy the thing that hangs on it.

There are only four answers worth knowing, and a knuckle tells you three of them. A solid masonry wall sounds dull and hurts. A stud wall sounds hollow between the studs and dull on them, roughly every sixteen inches. Plasterboard over battens sounds hollow everywhere and crumbles into a fine grey dust when drilled. Tile is masonry with a brittle skin, and it punishes hesitation.

Blulu's Wall & Fixings shelf runs to 219 lines: anchors, brackets, hooks, mirror clips, shutter fasteners, corner protectors and the screws to go with them. Nothing on that shelf can tell you what your wall is. That part is yours, and it is the only part that cannot be bought.

This guide is about the decisions that come before the drill: what actually carries a load, what a stated pack count is good for, and where a fixing stops being a hardware question and becomes a safety one.

What actually carries the weight

A fixing is a chain, and the chain is only as good as the part nobody looks at. There are four links: the wall material, the anchor inside it, the screw through the anchor, and the fitting the screw holds. Buyers spend their attention on the fourth link and their money on the first three by accident.

• Into a stud, wood or steel. The screw does the work and no anchor is needed. This is the strongest ordinary fixing available in a house, and it is free. The catch is that studs are where they are, not where the picture should go.
• Into masonry. A plug expands as the screw enters and grips the sides of the hole. The hole has to be the right diameter and deep enough that the plug sits below the surface. A plug that stands proud is a plug that will pull out.
• Into hollow plasterboard. The anchor has to spread its load behind the board, because the board itself is chalk. Toggles and expanding anchors do this. Plain plugs do not, whatever the packet says.
• Into tile. Drill through the glaze slowly with the drill set to rotation only, then switch to hammer once you are into whatever is behind it. Every mistake here is permanent and visible.

The failure that surprises people is not the wall giving way. It is the screw pulling out of an anchor that was slightly too big, held in place by nothing but friction and optimism.

200 Piece Drywall Anchors 1/4 x 1-1/2 Inch Pan Head Alloy Steel, Silver

Hollow-wall anchors spread the load behind the board, which is what plasterboard needs and a plain plug cannot do.

$21.99 $0.11 each

How many fixings a job actually eats

Fixings are bought by the pack for the same reason they are lost by the handful. A shelf takes four. A mirror takes four clips and four screws. A run of hooks in a hallway takes one per hook plus the two you drop behind the radiator. The pack count on the box is not a suggestion of scale, it is the number you will get through faster than you think.

What the range itself looks like, counted rather than described:

Figures come from the stated pack counts on those lines, rounded up to the cent so the per-piece number is never lower than the one you pay.

The pattern in that table holds across the shelf: fixings are one of the few categories where the very large pack is usually correct, because the item is small, it does not spoil, and running out mid-job is worse than storing the remainder. The exception is the specialised fixing bought for one appliance or one panel, where the pack of fifty is fifty of something you will never use again.

The part that is not a hardware question

There is one use of this shelf where the stakes are different in kind, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than buried in a specification. Furniture and televisions that are not fixed to a wall fall on children.

CPSC's “Anchor It!” is a national public education campaign to prevent furniture and TV tip-overs from killing and seriously injuring children.

the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

The federal campaign behind that sentence exists because the hazard is both common and invisible. A chest of drawers is stable until every drawer is open and a toddler is standing on the bottom one, at which point the centre of gravity has left the footprint entirely and the piece is a lever.

Children like to climb on furniture. For them, the home is a playground. As you childproof, you may not be aware that unsecured TVs, furniture and appliances are hidden hazards lurking in every room.

the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

Two things follow for anybody buying brackets and straps. The first is that the fixing has to reach a stud or a proper masonry anchor. An anti-tip strap screwed into plasterboard alone is a strap that will hold until the day it is needed. The second is that the hardware supplied with the furniture is the hardware the manufacturer tested.

Follow the manufacturer’s instructions to secure TVs and furniture properly.

the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

We publish counts, sizes and materials for the fixings on this site. We do not publish load ratings, because a load rating belongs to a tested assembly of anchor, wall and fitting, not to a screw in a bag. If a line states a figure, it is on its page. If it does not, no figure is invented for it.

Televisions should only be placed on furniture designed to hold a television, such as television stands or media centers.

the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

None of this is professional safety advice, and it does not replace what the manufacturer of the furniture tells you. It is published guidance from a national body, quoted so you can follow it back to the people who wrote it. The full list is on the sources page, with the date each page was read.

Mirrors, glass and the fixings made for them

Mirror clips are a small category with an outsized failure rate, because a mirror behaves differently from a picture. It is heavy for its area, it is rigid, and it is unforgiving of a frame that is not flat. Four clips holding a large mirror to a wall that bows will crack it at the corner nearest the high point.

Three rules cover most of it. Clips carry a mirror from below, so the bottom pair does the work and the top pair only stops it swinging forward. The wall behind wants to be flat, or the mirror needs packing where it is not. And a mirror in a bathroom moves with heat and damp, so a fixing that is tight to the millimetre in January will be tight in a different way in July.

20 Piece Glass Mirror Holder Clips, Grey

Mirror clips are sold in fours and sixes because a mirror needs a matched set, not a pair.

$4.99 $0.25 each

The same logic applies to acrylic panels, shutters and anything else rigid and wide. The fixing is not holding a weight so much as holding a shape.

The five minutes before the drill

Nothing in this section costs anything, and it prevents most of the damage.

• Find the services. Above and below a socket or a switch there is cable, and it runs vertically. Horizontal runs exist too, and they are less predictable. A detector is worth its price the first time.
• Mark, do not eyeball. Two marks and a level beat one mark and confidence. A shelf that is out by two degrees looks broken from across a room even though the fixings are perfect.
• Drill the small hole first. A pilot hole gives you one chance to discover you are in the wrong place while the mistake is still the size of a pencil.

3000 Piece Self-Adhesive Hang Tags Self Adhesive Hanging Tabs, Clear

Tape, ties and seals are the consumables a job eats between the drill and the tidy-up.

$50.99 $0.02 each

Vacuum as you go. Plaster dust in a carpet is a job of its own, and dust in the hole reduces the grip of the plug.

The Repair & Workshop shelf carries the small consumables that make this easier: tapes, ties, seals and the bits that get lost between jobs.

When the answer is not a fixing at all

Three cases come up often enough to name.

• A rented wall. Adhesive hooks and tension fittings exist because a deposit is worth more than a perfectly placed shelf. They have limits, and those limits are lower on textured or freshly painted surfaces.
• A wall that has already failed. A hole that has been filled and re-drilled twice is not going to hold on the third attempt. Move the fixing two inches and let the old hole be somebody else's archaeology.
• A load that belongs on the floor. Tall storage full of heavy things wants to stand on the floor and be steadied by the wall, not to hang from it. The fixing is there to stop it tipping, not to carry it.

248 Piece 1 Inch Wood Alphabet Letters Numbers Blank Unfinished, Multicolour

Storage that stands on the floor and is steadied at the top is the arrangement that survives being climbed on.

$13.99 $0.06 each

The screw, and why its head is not a detail

A fixing pack contains two decisions that look like one. The anchor decides whether the wall holds. The screw decides whether you can still remove the thing in five years, and whether the head is still there to grip when you try.

Drive type. A cross head cams out under load, which is a designed behaviour: it protects the fixing from being over-tightened by a power driver. That is exactly what you do not want on a fixing you will undo by hand. A hex or square drive holds the bit and does not chew.

Head shape. A countersunk head sits flush and pulls the fitting tight against the wall. A pan head sits proud and holds a bracket without pulling it in. Using the wrong one is how a bracket ends up bowed.

Finish. Zinc plated is for dry indoor use. Anything on an outside wall, in a bathroom, or near a coast wants stainless, and the reason is not the screw itself but the stain that runs down the wall from it.

Length. The rule of thumb worth remembering is that at least twice the thickness of what you are fixing should end up inside the wall. Longer is not better by default: a screw that bottoms out in a plug stops pulling the fitting tight and starts pushing the plug out.

Every one of those is stated on the packet in some form. None of them is stated in a way that is obvious across a shop. That is the reason the specification rows on a product page here print what the line actually says rather than a summary of it.

The words on the packet, in plain English

The vocabulary in this department is unusually opaque for something so ordinary, and most of it is worth exactly one sentence.

• Anchor, plug, rawlplug. Three words for the sleeve that goes in the hole so the screw has something to bite.
• Toggle. An anchor with wings that open behind plasterboard. The strongest hollow-wall option and the hardest to remove.
• Self-drilling. Cuts its own hole in plasterboard. Fast, convenient, and weaker than a toggle in the same wall.
• Pilot hole. The small hole drilled first, to stop the bit wandering and the wood splitting.
• Countersink. The cone-shaped recess that lets a screw head finish flush.
• Grub screw. A headless screw tightened with a hex key, common on handles and rails.
• Standoff. A spacer that holds a fitting a fixed distance off the wall, so a sign or a mirror floats.

None of these terms tells you what your wall is made of. That remains, stubbornly, the one fact the whole job depends on and the one thing no packet can supply.

What this site states, and what it leaves out

Every product page in this department prints what the line itself states: the count in the box, the stated dimensions, the material and the colour. Where a figure is not stated, the row is absent rather than filled with an average, and that is what makes some pages here shorter than others.

We do not publish load ratings, pull-out figures, torque values or a recommendation of one fixing over another for a specific wall, because those are properties of a tested assembly rather than of a part in a bag. We also do not publish a warranty of our own.

Prices carry a date, stated once on our editorial policy page rather than stamped across every screen. Ordering, payment, delivery and returns happen at checkout, wherever you place the order.

Read next

If the job in front of you is a party rather than a wall, read a party for thirty, counted backwards. If it is a drawer of small parts that nobody can find anything in, read sorting small parts so they can be found again.

Or start from the shelves: wall and fixings, repair and workshop, storage and organising.