How (and why) to find a stud
Post contains affiliate links. Thank you for supporting my blog/channel in this way without spending any extra money!
***Insert Dad joke about stud finders here***
First, let me explain. The best laid plans and all. Today should’ve been the Amazon projector/Basic Niche video. But as I’ve said many times, a flat surface is the most important step for a well calibrated projector. And, well, 4 year olds.
Mine found my Easy Press sitting out on my floor (in the room she's not supposed to be in). Plugged it in (because I had very intentionally left it unplugged) and "helped" press her in-progress dress sitting on my cutting table, thereby heating my mat up and causing it’s sudden demise. She didn't burn herself, scorch the dress, burn down the house, or any such doomful thing.
But RIP mat.
And old, spare mat stored underneath.
And, also, now I cannot record an Amazon/Basic Niche calibration video until my new one arrives.
See 16 second video below for a visual demonstration of her, errr, helpfulness.
So, I decided to tackle another video in my queue instead: what’s a stud, where is it, how do I find it, and why should I care? I filmed in my husband’s woodshop, which is in various stages of completion, so you could see what I was talking about.
With very few exceptions, homes are built with a frame of studs (for walls) and ceiling joists (for ceilings) as the sort of skeleton of the house and then those are covered by sheets of finishing material. (I mean, this isn’t universal. My uncle built an awesome house from hay bales and adobe!) Inside most modern (and relatively modern) homes, the interior walls and ceilings are covered with drywall. Drywall is made from gypsum (in fact, it is also called “gypsum board,” more info here and here if you care to read further). While it has several properties that make it ideal for this purpose (soundproofing, fireproofing, etc.), it doesn’t hold much weight as it is very crumbly. It’s basically two pieces of paper with soft, crumbly gypsum pressed between them.
Here’s a picture from when we cut a huge hole in our house to make windows into doors. The drywall is the most interior layer, on the far left. You can see how, near the top, the paper tore and the insides just crumbled.
A top down look at a cross section that was removed from our wall. The exterior is by my foot, the stud in the center, and the interior on the right. In most homes, that would be drywall. (And, yes, that’s the electrical wire that got cut by accident, rendering half the plugs in my craftroom useless…)
If you put more weight on the drywall than the paper outside can hold up, the paper tears, the gypsum inside crumbles, and gravity takes over to some fairly disastrous effects. Then you’ve got a mess to clean up, a broken thing to replace, and drywall to repair.
So how can we make sure it’s not our projectors that end up broken on the floor?
You’ve got a few different options.
First, you may not have drywall at all. In my old craftroom as well as my current one, there is wood paneling on the wall. It’s actual, solid wood paneling, not the flimsy 70s pressed board paneling you may be thinking of. The wood is solid enough to hold nails and screws securely, so I don’t have to worry about where studs (or even ceiling joists in the current room) are positioned. I’ll just have to use wood filler to fill in any holes I make and paint to blend it in if I take things down later.
Maybe you’ve conveniently bought a house that is old enough and well-built enough that the walls are shiplapped and someone came through and drywalled over the top. The rest of our house is like that. In the picture above, the drywall is the far left, most interior layer, but just behind it, one layer to the right is shiplap. As long as the nail or screw goes through into that second layer, I can hang anything anywhere I want!
But, if your home is typically drywalled, the drywall is screwed to the studs/ceiling joists with just a void between studs. If the thing you are hanging is light enough, say an “Amazon” projector, you can use drywall anchors. There are many types with different uses and functions but the basic idea of all of them is that they displace the weight of what you’ve hung over a large area on the back of the drywall rather than just in the hole you’ve made with the screw. In the video, I had my husband show several drywall anchors and the ones he prefers.
If you’re hanging something heavy, more like a Short Throw projector, you’ll need to make sure that at least one, if not two, of your screws go into a stud or ceiling joist. Even with an “Amazon” projector, this is the more secure way to hang it. The rest of your screws may have to be secured in anchors as described above.
The final choice is to secure a board to a stud and then you can secure your mount to that board. Below, you can see how my dad did that in the rental we lived in. It did have the 70s pressed board paneling that couldn’t hold any weight.
Boards screwed into the stud
Mount screwed into the boards
In either of the last two options, your first step will be to locate a stud. Again, you’ve got some options here. The most common option is to use a stud finder. And this is my favorite choice (besides giving the job completely to someone else, but I digress). These can vary greatly in usability, accuracy, and, of course, price. My husband’s favorite is this one but it’s pricey. You can find a huge variety of features and price points, though. Definitely read reviews. They’re pretty easy to use and will come with instructions. We demonstrate the one my husband likes in the video.
Another option is to use math and laws of probability. My dad likes to use this method. I do not. But the basic idea is that, since studs are typically on 16” centers (meaning it should be 16 inches from the center of one stud to the next), you find where one stud is by using the end of the wall/a door/a window and measure/count/do math from there. Not all studs are actually on 16” centers (some are 24”, some are just anarchy), they might have used the other corner of the room to begin their pattern rather than the one you chose, I mean, there’s just a lot that can go wrong in my opinion.
Then there’s the “dowsing rod” methods. I’m not knocking (insert rim shot here) these methods but I definitely don’t have the patience or time to use them accurately. However, you can (theoretically) hear the difference when knocking on the drywall covering the void and the drywall covering the solid stud. It make sense to me that this is a thing but I have never been able to do it. People also have success using magnets to locate the screw heads that attach the drywall to the studs. Again, I understand why this is possible but I have not been entirely successful doing it.
And finally, if you don’t mind patching holes, you can just start hammering a nail into your drywall. It’s fairly obvious when the nail just goes easily through drywall and when you have to give it some force to hammer it into the stud.
Usually, the guys in my life who actually know what they’re doing combine the math/probability method with the knocking on the drywall method and then test it by driving a nail in. They’re rarely wrong but also are willing to patch holes if they do make a mistake.
OK, so we’ve covered what studs/ceiling joists are, why we need them to mount our projectors, and how to find them. Hopefully, for the next video I’ll be back on track, showing you how to mount a Basic Niche mount. And, if you didn’t luck out by buying a house that has solid wood ceilings in your craftroom, you can use the information from this post/video to get your projector securely mounted as well!
‘Till next time friends,
Branalyn
