A $1 Fix for Your Wobbly Towel Bar (and Almost Anything Else Hanging on a Hollow Wall)

Image of a pile of butterfly-style toggle bolts decorated with a frame illustration.

This is an ode to the toggle bolt, an elegant and inexpensive fix for wobbly towel bars, not-so-floating shelves, and any other fixture that needs to hold some weight on a hollow wall. For less than $1 per bolt, I’ve purchased my freedom from wiggly wall mounts.

The loose towel bar in my bathroom was one of those nuisances that my family tolerated, even as it regularly drained our patience and made our lives a little bit worse. Anytime I heard someone washing their hands, I feared that this would be the hand-drying towel tug that would pull the bar out of the wall again, setting me up for yet another attempted repair.

Part of the issue: Towel bars are usually 24 inches long, but a typical American home’s wall (to the extent that such a thing exists) has a solid wood stud every 16 inches. One end of that bar won’t line up with a stud.

To make up for that, most towel bars come with a couple of plastic drywall plugs, meant to hold support screws steady in a hollow wall without the support of a stud (or blocking between the studs). But those thin plugs can support only a few pounds of weight. Even a wet bath towel puts too much stress on such a flimsy anchor, and if your kindergartener decides to use it like a monkey bar, forget it.

I had tried to secure the bar with increasingly thick plastic plugs and screws, and my daughter learned not to hang from it, but the bar eventually started dangling again anyway.

And then I heard about toggle bolts.

Staff pick

This variety pack of butterfly-style toggle bolts should get you through tons of wall-mounting projects. Bigger wings hold heavier loads.



from Wirecutter: Reviews for the Real World https://ift.tt/PvQw124
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