My house is moderately old, just over a century, and it's constructed of solid brick walls with plaster over the interior of those walls.
From time to time, I find myself needing holes in the walls to mount things, and it never goes very well. Some of the holes go in easily, but others drift off, and often I end up with an excessively large hole, so I have to either move and re-drill the holes. or bodge it by partially filling the holes with something else, like pieces of wood.
Mostly this works, but it slows things down, and I'll often have to put an excessive number of holes in for heavier items, and use more mounting points than would seem necessary, as some mounts end up a bit 'iffy', to use a technical term!
Searching for solutions online, the best suggestion I've found is to just drill a lot of small holes, to find the lines of mortar, and then space the holes so that they're in the middle of bricks. I guess this would work, but is going to be tedious, won't always work for the spacing of some attachment points, and will go wrong where there isn't a simple contiguous stretcher bond.
I'm sure plenty of other people have similar problems, so there must be some sort of relatively straightforward solution? The best additional help I can think of, is some sort of quick setting epoxy or filler, that could go into any accidentally large holes, and once set would provide a location to re-drill more easily, a better hole. I've had a search for anything, but nothing obvious came up, beyond traditional 'polyfiller' plaster type materials, which take a long time to set, and may possibly be fair weaker than the original wall.
I've had exactly the same problem with both large holes using expanding strong metal mounts, as well as much smaller plastic 'rawlplug' type fittings.
Any thoughts?
