How to Fix Heavy Items to Plasterboard Wall in a New Build

Are you struggling to fix heavy items to plasterboard wall in your new build? Yes? Keep reading, because we have gone through this process very recently & am I sharing all my knowledge with you.

The way new houses are built- you can’t use your normal wall plugs, as you are not drilling into a brick work, you are drilling into plaster board. A New build wall is made up like this (masonry builds in the UK for mass house builders):

From the outside:

• brick work (outer leaf)
• cavity filled with insulation
• block work (inner leaf)
• gap – void
• plasterboard

It is this gap/ void (from plasterboard fixing to the brick) where the weakness lies.

Here is a link to NHBC ‘Guide to your new house‘ on page 28 it details the wall construction.

I will go through all the fixings we have used for each item.

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En-suite & Bathroom cabinets

Our bathroom cabinets are heavy, with mirror doors and are very tall (GoodHome Imandra) + all the bathroom stuff we are storing in them. The cabinet alone, from memory, was about 15-20kgs. We needed to make sure that the fixings we used would hold up to 50kgs.

The fixings we used for these were Zinc Plated Heavy Duty Anchors

We got them from Amazon and they cost £12.99 – link here

Mirror

We have full length mirror (Contemporary Natural Solid Oak) that we wanted to put up mid-way down the stairs. The mirror weighs 15kgs, so it was much easier to know which ones to use, as the weight of this will not change.

The fixings we used for these were Zinc Plated Heavy Duty Anchors

We got them from Amazon and they cost £12.99 – link here

Shelves

James made up some shelves for our airing and utility cupboard to make more space for storage. Dimensions of each shelf 121 x 54cm (L x W) and each shelf was fixed into the wall in 7 places: 2 on each side and 3 on the back.

We used Fisher Steel Hollow Wall Anchor

We got them from B&Q and they cost £4.10 per pack of 4 – link here

Curtain Poles

This is the main reason why I wanted to write this post and share our knowledge with all of you. The very first thing we put up in our new house was living room curtain pole, where we did use the fixings it came with, but this didn’t feel very secure. We change the fixings to Fisher Self Drill 35mm, when putting up other curtain poles we got a pack of 100 for £16.00 from Amazon – link here. As we didn’t like the curtains in our living room we ordered new ones, which were much more heavier than the previous ones. We knew straight away we would need to change the fixings. 

This was, without the doubt, the most frustrating and time consuming thing we have done in this house. James was re-drilling, moving the place of fixing, filling holes, sanding & painting 3 times, before going on the trusted Google and looking for a solution. He found these bad boys – TV Fixing Kit – Corefix (support 150kgs). These were amazing and have done the job. I’m still not sure why we had so many problems with this curtain pole in particular, but it is up.

We used Corefix TV Fixing Kit

We got them from Amazon and they cost £8.75 – link here

Top Tips

Going forwards we would definitely recommend the Corefix ones, especially for wider windows (as our lounge). We have the Fisher Self Drill in our master bedroom, spare & our home office. For our 4th bedroom that we have now converted into full working office for both of us now, James re-did the fixings to Corefix when we (finally) bought curtains for it.

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I have also done a little video on YouTube to show our living room curtain pole battle – link here.

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