Wall-mount sink on plaster wall
Hi everyone. We are renovating a small second-floor bathroom in a 1901 brownstone and want to use either a pedestal or wall-mounted sink. The wall to which the sink would be mounted is plaster. (Currently, there is a sink there with a large vanity/cabinet thing, which we haven’t removed yet.) What do we need to know and what should we be thinking about in installing something that is mounted on the wall here? Thank you !
mstamib
in General Discussion 4 years and 11 months ago
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stevecym | 4 years and 10 months ago
so bob, i just checked a 1915 industrial catalog. it gets more interesting. “bits” are what go in the hand brace – the wood augers with the chamfered squarish shaft. “Drills” are the modern twist drills that we put in the electric drill. by this time the electric drill had been invented though i am not sure it was in common use.
stevecym | 4 years and 10 months ago
bob,
i cannot recall using the hand drill in shop. we had one at home and i still have one here. i have always called a drill bit a drill bit and often wondered if that teacher was correct. Now that you have entertained this, i think i know where the shift in the words comes from – the tool you reference was not called a drill but a “brace”. it held a “drill” not a “drill bit”. with the advent of electric tools, the machine that held a drill became the drill. so they had to call the drill bit something else. i do seem to recall ordering bits from an industrial catalog and they were called “drills”. i have some old hardware and tool catalogs here from the turn of the century and might take a look to see how they reference them. i suspect though that the shop teacher i am thinking of was harking back to another era – how else would he know that a bit was “what went in a horse’s mouth”. i bet that old guy was resisting change just like some people wish it would slow down now.
shahnandersen
in General Discussion 4 years and 10 months ago
Steve,
Perhaps I am the same vintage (or a little older) than you, but in my shop class a bit was the drilling tool that is attached to a hand brace (remember those).
stevecym | 4 years and 10 months ago
so i have been thinking about the issue with the plastic mollys and the masonry bits that come in the kit with them. in an ideal world, the bit that comes in the anchor kit is sized perfectly for the anchor. but when drilling masonry, the bit often removes more than it should even when the mortar does not crumble. it may be that the bit wanders, particularly when using a hammer drill, enlarging the hole. because of this, what bob is saying about the plastic anchors is correct, they are risky. so over time i have learned NOT to use the bit with the kits but go with one a tad bit (no pun; by the way drill bits are not bits but “drills” – i had a shop teacher tell me “a ‘bit’ goes in a horses mouth”) smaller. this tightens the hole up around the plastic molly. no epoxy needed.
stevecym | 4 years and 10 months ago
and by the way, what i am talking about is not far off the hilti system which uses an anchoring epoxy to set heavy construction anchors.
using materials this way and using modern materials (such as epoxies which were not around when i was in grade school) is how this industry can move and modernize and become more efficient and better. less time guessing, worrying about holes sizes and more time doing- but people have to stay on top of things.
stevecym | 4 years and 10 months ago
bob, the dowel thing is old. it will work unless the brick it crumbly. here is the thing contractors learn and this is the part the people writing on here do not understand: when a contractor goes to the job, he cannot be thinking about how to do this – he has to know how to do it before he arrives at the job. a one size fits all approach otherwise we look like idiots in front of the customer. the dowel might work. the lead anchor might work. an expandable anchor might work. the brick might crumble, the brick might not crumble. i might use my masonary bit to drill the hole and it might remove more material than i had wanted it to. the bit might “wander” in the mortar drilling an uneven hole. on the job, if i encounter any of this and stand there trying to figure out what to do like i have never seen this before, the customer will look at me and think THEY made a mistake bringing me there. unless a contractor has warned a customer that he is stepping out of his zone, there can be no experimenting and all of this other stuff, the lead anchor and the dowel, they are experimental because we do not know the conditions of the masonry wall.
so back to the plastic anchor. drill a deep hole to receive a long screw, set epoxy (from an epoxy stick) in there, push the anchor in deeper than the collar on it and get the screw in before it hardens. done. no dowel, no lead anchor, no worry about crumbling brick;; with the screw and anchor stuck in the epoxy, it will go no where. it may no longer be the anchor holding the mess, but may be the epoxy and screw.
i have been using this method since some of the people on here were in grade school (right 30 years). i discovered it on a crumbling plaster wall.
i keep talking about crumbling brick here. i would say, 50% of holes i have drilled in brick and mortar go into material that crumbles. anyone reading this has to be prepared for that – sure, you can have a bigger dowel there or lead anchor, but what happens if the material crumbles again when you go to enlarge the hole to suit that dowel or anchor? the epoxy helps bind it all together.
now, when hanging something heavy, we should always drill the hole up a little, that way the weight pulls down on the mortar, not out of the hole.
RobertGMarvin
in General Discussion 4 years and 10 months ago
Is a dowel stronger than a lead anchor?
2345bcde | 4 years and 11 months ago
Drill into the brick with a decent sized masonry bit ( use a hammer drill ). Go into the wall 3 inches or so and taper a dowel and drive into the wall with a hammer. Cut the dowel flush with a thin pull saw and screw into the dowel. This works great is very strong and will last a lot longer then we will.
cate | 4 years and 11 months ago
Agree with what Steve says. A wall-mounted sink is attached to metal brackets and the brackets are attached to the plaster and lathe using anchors specially made for plaster. It has been our experience that licensed plumbers are familiar with how to attach wall-hung sinks (though in our house they’ve only removed and rehung ones that were already present, using the existing materials).
greenworks | 4 years and 11 months ago
We just bought the carbide, hoping that works!
RobertGMarvin
in General Discussion 4 years and 11 months ago
Could you drill into the brick with a carbide bit?
greenworks | 4 years and 11 months ago
Yeah we tried to wall mount a tv to our exterior wall (truly exterior, detached house on that side) and it’s been a trip. We have those (barely) furring strips steve mentioned, then rock hard old brick and very soft mortar so almost nothing holds. We had to get creative to find a solution where tv would not fall off wall.
Our party wall is def just plaster over brick.
RobertGMarvin
in General Discussion 4 years and 11 months ago
My 1899 house is the same. We’re writing about the same thing Steve–what you called “outside walls between the neighboring houses” I refereed to as “party walls”.
stevecym | 4 years and 11 months ago
bob, just to clarify (for the benefit of op, not to debate you), in the house i am sitting in, the outside walls between the neighboring houses are plaster on brick (which is easy to drive a deep anchor into) and the outside walls to the front and rear have the air gap with firring and lath. my guess is that was done for insulation or to prevent condensation from settling on the plaster when the heat was put on suddenly if the wall was cold (this is only a guess, perhaps something is written about it).
for anyone who does not trust anchors. there are the expandable hilti. but let’s keep something in mind – the anchor is only as good as the surrounding mortar and brick and some red bricks get very soft inside. so back to what i say some place above, plug the hole with epoxy and push the anchor in and drive a long screw. in so far as the small anchors, ditch them and go right to the larger.
here is what we do when we have to hang something and we cannot locate studs. and it is what i used to do when building staircases and i had to terminate the top rail on t he top floor against the wall – with no available stud: we make a rossette a good bit larger than the hand rail and anchor the rossette and then attach the handrail to it. spread the load out a bit. what does this have to do with the OP and the sink? they can anchor a larger piece of wood to the wall and then put the bracket on that. if they can hit a stud someplace, even better. then put the bracket to that piece of wood with regular screws. the only reason i did not suggest this at the beginning was now the sink protrudes off the wall the thickness of the wood, so now they have a small tiling job on top of it. perhaps some cement boards and tiling, depending on the thickness. if it were me in my house, i would try all other ways before resorting to this just because of the tile work.
brokelin | 4 years and 11 months ago
Once you explore what’s in the wall, and you think you can get it installed but won’t feel good about people leaning on it, consider using a style of sink the you can support from the front as well. Wall hung sinks with 2 steel legs in front (or sometimes 2 ceramic legs with some old or reproduction sink styles) give some more support to the sink, I believe – at least, they appear to. Might be worth exploring.
While I like the old, wall-hung sinks without supports (had an old cast iron one in one rental that I liked a lot, despite the chips in the white enamel near the drain), the ones with steel legs will read more mid-century, when they were popular, or modern in the case of the wider legged chromed-legged ones, and the ones with ceramic legs look very Victorian.
I soooo remember being constantly told not to put my weight on the old wall-hung sink in the house I lived in til I was 9 – that sink was probably original to the 1930’s-built house, and not going anywhere, and we were skinny kids back in the 60s. Perhaps my parents were overworried, or perhaps they had seen old sinks come loose.
An alternative might be a pedestal sink – a old or a reproduction one with a wider flared base that mostly supports the sink might give you reason to believe that sink isn’t going anywhere. But I don’t know how much weight those take from the wall – I think the newer ones are mostly (perhaps all?) wall hung as well, and the reproduction one I have lived with was just sort of perched on the skinny base at the top that I wouldn’t have expected to hold the sink up at all – the wall-hung connection was certainly doing all the work-but I have seen some old ones that are freestanding – though they tend to be larger sinks.
RobertGMarvin
in General Discussion 4 years and 11 months ago
I’m sure Steve’s right about the lack of studs on outside walls; I made an assumption because I knew there was lath and some space between plaster and brick.
Regarding using anchors on plaster applied directly to plaster on brick—make sure to use LONG anchors and screws. I learned the hard way! I installed bookshelves using ordinary lead anchors and they fell because I had only drilled into thh by e plaster. I then got VERY long anchors and made sure to drill well into the brick. The shelves, holding heavy books, have remained in place for >45 years. BTW—O don’t trust plastic anchors. Are lead ones still available? Am I being overly cautious?
stevecym | 4 years and 11 months ago
so it is the rear wall. see what i said before and see what bobs says. some houses have plaster on brick and some it is “sticked” (firred). if you hang a bracket on something sticked, you have to land the screws onto the sticking. but since the sticking us usually crap, i would drill holes and use anchors into the underlying brick. But pray it is plaster on brick. this would be easiest. also, some houses they stick the front and rear walls and then lay the plaster with lath but will lay the sidewall plaster right to the brick. if this goes in a corner, can you put the bracket on the sidewall, assuming that was plaster on brick.
and i would not be misled by what bob says about calling the sticking on the brick studs. with all respect to his experience, most of what i have seen is crappy old firing, not studs.
you have to find out what you are dealing with. if you are thinking of doing this yourself, finding out how the wall is constructed should be no issue. i just banged on the wall next to me where i am typing this and it sounded hollow, that mean s it is sticked. if i tap the wall behind me, the common wall between me and my neighbor, it will be plaster on brick and will not make any sound when i tap it.
mstamib
in General Discussion 4 years and 11 months ago
Thanks all. This is unfortunately not an interior wall. It’s the wall at the top of the stairs-when you are going up the stairs, it would be the wall you are facing. I am not sure what kinds of supports are in the wall.
yudashasom | 4 years and 11 months ago
Interior plaster is most commonly applied over wood lathe and studs. Anyone installing this should know what to do.