Flat-pack furniture ships with an anti-tip strap and a screw and plug, and the plug supplied is a generic one. What actually holds depends entirely on what your wall is made of.
Find Out What You Are Fixing Into
The step everyone skips. Walls in homes vary enormously and each type needs a different fixing.
A small pilot hole tells you a great deal: what colour the dust is, how much resistance there is, and whether the drill suddenly goes through into a cavity.
Use Both Straps
Anti-tip kits supply two straps for a reason, and using one is a common shortcut.
Two fixings spread the load and prevent the furniture pivoting on a single point. Manufacturers who include a proper anti-toppling bracket rather than a token strap, of the kind at facbotall.net, are supplying the right hardware; the wall fixing is the part that still needs matching to the wall.
The Common Wall Types
- Timber stud with plasterboard: fix into the stud itself wherever possible
- Plasterboard with a cavity behind: needs a proper cavity fixing, not a plastic plug
- Solid brick: a plug and screw works well
- Concrete block: similar, with a masonry bit and a hammer drill
- Lath and plaster in older homes: fragile, and needs care
- Dot-and-dab plasterboard on masonry: a common trap, with a gap behind
The Plasterboard Problem
A plastic wall plug in plasterboard holds almost nothing. It is designed to expand against solid material, and there is nothing there to expand against.
For plasterboard, the options are finding a stud with a detector and fixing into that, or using a fixing designed for cavities: a spring toggle, a metal self-drilling anchor or a hollow wall anchor.
Fixing into a stud is always better than any cavity anchor, and worth moving a piece of furniture a few inches to achieve.
Dot-and-Dab Catches People Out
Plasterboard stuck to a masonry wall with adhesive dabs, leaving a gap of an inch or so behind the board.
A short screw into the plasterboard alone holds nothing. A longer screw and plug reaching the masonry behind works, but the plug must sit in the masonry, not in the gap.
Why This Matters
Furniture tip-over kills children. A child opens the lower drawers of a chest, climbs them, and the loaded unit comes over.
Anchoring is the measure that prevents it, and an anchor that pulls out of plasterboard is the same as no anchor at all. This is the one part of flat-pack assembly worth doing properly rather than quickly.
Check Before Drilling
Cables and pipes run in predictable places: vertically and horizontally from sockets and switches. A detector costs little and is worth using every time.
Check It Occasionally
Fixings loosen. Once a year, a pull test on anything anchored takes a minute.
