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How to mount a closet rod so it won’t fall (again)

So on the third or fourth day of moving into our new house, we unpacked all of our clothes, and hung them in the closet on the rod that was already there.  And on the fifth, it all came down.

Apparently, the curtain rod had only been screwed into the plaster walls with screws and no anchors.  Not that that would really have helped, as we learned in our former residence when over a three week period two shelves and one set of hooks fell down, which had been anchored into the wall.

So, I had to mount this rod back up in way that it wouldn’t fall down again.

I immediately eyed the wood one by four that went around the interior of the closet.  In order to make it work, I needed to add another piece of one by four for the bottom part of the support for the curtain rod.

The support with a one by four mounted to the wall to provide an anchor.
The support with a one by four mounted to the wall to provide an anchor.

As you can see in the picture, I mounted the one by four to the wall, and then the curtain support to the one by four.  I used screws that are designed to go through two or more different materials, and they seemed to do exactly that, really well.  I also expect that this mount will be less likely to pull away from the wall because the stress on the wall is spread out between 4 different screws.

the screws I used to mount the 1 by 4.
the screws I used to mount the 1 by 4.

Next, I had to mount the other rod support in the wall.  This is the rod support that had actually come out of the wall, so I knew I needed to make sure it was anchored to a part of the wall that it wouldn’t be likely to fall out of.  Instead of marking the holes that needed to be drilled on the wall and then drilling (which always seems to end in the holes being slightly out of alignment), I attached a piece of double sided mounting tape on the back and then drilled the holes through the mount.

Mounting tape on the back of the rod mount.
Mounting tape on the back of the rod mount.

It worked beautifully! It made the process of putting up the rod so much easier.  Now that it’s up, it’s holding a lot of shirts and pants for my wife and the mounts to the wall don’t appear to be under any stress.

The Completed closet rod.
The Completed closet rod.

I really like this kind of rod, as it allows us to maximize the space in a closet with a slanted ceiling, but it needed a bit more support than it had originally.

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2 responses to “How to mount a closet rod so it won’t fall (again)”

  1. Gregg Avatar
    Gregg

    Why don’t you use toggle bolts? I’ve had really good luck with them supporting all sorts of weight very strongly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KROvIXsPrCs

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    1. Matt Kauko Avatar
      Matt Kauko

      Toggle bolts are one of my favorite ways to mount heavy things to a wall. I mounted a flat screen tv with them and had great success. However, using slightly smaller toggle bolts to hold up a shelf did not work. The shelf fell off the wall after about half a year of use. The problem was the material the old walls (over 100 years old) were made out of had become too brittle to support much weight. When we placed something on the shelf, the whole shelf came down.

      I think it might have been related to the fact that we kept removing and adding weight to the shelf, much like what we do with a closet rod. I wanted to try and spread out the stress placed on the wall as much as possible. Combine that with the fact there already was a 1 X 4 to anchor the rod to it made more sense to just use a decent screw and screw it into real wood than try and put it back in the wall.

      We’ll see though! Hopefully it’ll hold.

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