Are they about 16' apart? You've found your studs. When you hit a stud you will hear a thunk. Sections without a stud will sound hollow. Turn off the breaker, take off the face plate, nose around with a screwdriver on either side of the box to see if there is wood.

Most electrical boxes for outlets and light switches are located on either side of a stud. When the thing is beeping at everything, I turn to these tricks for locating a stud from Scott Sidler at The Craftsman blog. Some stud finders will be useless on plaster walls, as they can't tell wood lathe from wood stud. I have a stud finder that's pretty sophisticated and can locate wood, deep wood, metal, deep metal, and electrical current-and even that's not foolproof. Locating studs behind plaster wallsWhen hanging anything heavy, it's always best to find at least one stud, as no fastener is more fool-proof than screwing directly into a thick piece of wood. The walls in our 1946 home are plaster over masonry. There is a layer of hard plaster, a bit of space, then concrete blocks.

I took some photos for future reference, and I'm glad that I did. As homeowners now, when we gut renovated the bathroom down to the studs I had the opportunity to see and understand how our home had been constructed and what is behind our walls. Traditional wood-lath-and-plaster and plaster laid directly over masonry (brick or concrete). I've encountered two types of plaster walls. You want to choose the one that will hold the weight but is the least invasive to your walls. And then there are the different types of fasteners. The most important thing is to use masonry drill bits, so that you don't crumble the plaster. Additionally, plaster is far stronger than wallboard and, if you anchor it right, can hold more weight. Lime plaster gives walls a thickness and luster that is not only visually appealing, it's also healthier (walls can breath and don't get moldy) and more soundproof. Plaster walls only seem like a pain to work with because new construction has made us accustomed to wallboard. Worse, whole shelves could come tumbling down. The first step is to determine exactly what your walls are made of, because the methods that work for drywall are the absolute wrong approach for plaster walls and could damage the plaster. Because rental apartments in NYC had started out as single-family dwellings and over time became subdivided into apartments you could encounter a real mix of wall substrates, from plaster over masonry to wall board, in the same room. Still, I was always cautious about hanging things. Lucky for me, none of our landlords ever stipulated in the lease that we couldn't hang things on the walls or paint the walls bright colors, the way you hear many landlords do. I used toggle bolts to hang these floating shelvesīefore we became homeowners, we lived in many rentals in New York City.

Mounting tv to lath and plaster wall