How to Fix a Loose Toilet Paper Holder or Towel Rack

hey guys what I want to show you today something's pretty common both at home and then also a few of the rental properties that I have and that is how to repair a towel rack or a toilet paper holder or a hand towel holder super common for these to loosen up over time and they come with a few different types of anchoring mechanisms that would anchor into the drywall your first preference always when securing let's say a towel rack would be to try to find a stud to put the wood screws right in would screw into an actual 2x4 or 2x6 stud and that's going to give you a really secure anchor on the one side now with that set it's gonna be really hard to line that up on the other side since most does would be like 16 inches apart and the towel racks are not going to line up to that so inevitably you're going to need to use some type of anchoring mechanism into the drywall so there's a few different types there's actually quite a few different types may be a little bit confusing in terms which ones to use the ones that usually come in the package are just a simple like plastic expansion anchor plastic expansion anchors are okay those are what you're going to find on most just installed toilet paper holders or towel racks once the screw once you drill a pilot hole into the drywall then you then you tap in the plastic anchor expansion anchor and then and then you tighten the usually Phillips head screw into the anchor and expands and then presses into that pilot hole and then is supposed to hold in place very very common for those to loosen up and to be honest with you a lot of a lot of times that I've tried to do it and others I've seen that will actually be loose by the time you're done with the project because you had loosened up just through the tightening process of that screw so usually stepping out from there there there's and these seem to be newer and more popular nowadays are the threaded anchors these threaded anchors are actually self tapping you technically don't even need to do a pilot hole but often what people will do is maybe an expansion anchor loosened up and the threaded anchor is quite a bit larger in diameter so you could use that the hole that was loose for the expansion acre and you could thread in one of these threaded anchors again I've seen some issues with their plastic right so you're gonna have some issues if you're tightening that into the wall it gets a little tight you might strip it or my strip the plastic and then they usually when they seat into the wall you usually have a gap so it's gonna be really hard for you to get the bracket for the toilet paper holder or the the towel rack flush with the surface so you're always going to kind of have this little gap and then there's just a whole bunch of other ones but very common anchoring mechanisms would be the toggle bolt and these are these have been around for a long time and they can hold a lot of weight they really give you a good secure holding point to the drywall because of their design there are some newer ones there are some snap toggles which also can give you a very secure hold to the drywall but again the snap toggle depending on how you install might might give you a little bit of a gap as when women actually seats against the drywall and won't quite be as flush as what you'd get with a normal toggle bolt so what we have right here is we we have a toilet paper holder that has become loose we had expansion a normal expansion plastic anchors and then we stepped up to threaded now the threaded are completely stripped out and throw some taco bullets in there and that should hold it where I won't have to address this again and from my standpoint this saves me a lot of time in long term because I won't have to come back to this rental property between tenants and address these issues so for me it saves a lot of time but for you guys that might be at home very easy for a child or somebody to bump into one of these racks and really just a simple bump could could break them loose from the drywall and then you're gonna address that problem so let's dive in here and and I get after it all right so we'll start on the bottom side here of the toilet paper holder and we're gonna loosen up the two set screws you have one on each side depending on the brand you might have need a flathead screwdriver in this case the one I'm dealing with we need an Allen wrench so small allen wrench do be careful when you loosen these uh if you don't take your time and you don't have the wrench seated correctly you might strip out the set screw so once you get that set screw off you go ahead and take the holder off and you'll see the bracket the actual bracket that we secured to the drywall underneath the holder and we'll go after that second side there on the left side and a little bit easier to take this one off this is the loose side this is really the side that we need to repair usually the right side is pretty secure and that left sides a little little wobbly little loose so actually in this case you just pulled right now and you'll see two different types so we got the self-tapping screw there and then we also have just a hollow wall drywall anchor you can see with the screw out now we'll take that bracket and we'll go ahead and remove the old hollow wall anchor so by unscrewing the the Phillips head screw here and then once we get that one off we're going to go ahead and remove the Halloween core so we can reuse that bracket once we get the old Hardware off we will take the toggle bolt you're going to remove the spring side and then pass the bolt through the bracket and then go ahead and put the spring side back on so you get ready to put the toggle bolts within the wall so compress the springs here on the toggle bolts and then we're gonna push them right through the holes that were left by the old halt hardware depending on your situation you might have to drill a 3/8 inch sized hole with this sides toggle bolt and the ends specifically these toggle bolts are number 6 - 32 so it's the 32 thread count ya by 2 inches so once the springs expand on the other side of the drywall I pull the bracket to give a little pressure against the the bracket so the bolts can tighten up while I screw them with this compact nut driver so we'll continue to to tighten these up until you get a secure fit against the drywall and you can kind of move back and forth so you don't just do one side and then leave the other really loose so you'll feel there once it starts tightening up and really makes a nice hold so once we have the bracket on the left-hand side because I'm here I'm just gonna do the right-hand side anyways so this was tight but I'm going to remove the old hardware again similar it has a threaded self-tapping anchor on the top and then just just one of those normal kind of the run-of-the-mill expansion anchors on the bottom so I use a flat head screwdriver and kind of loosen this up with my pliers and then remove that from the bottom once that hardware is removed these holes are not the right size so we're going to need to take a 3/8 drill bit and we'll go ahead and make those the correct size so we can get the toggle bolts in with it with the new hardware so I'll drill out the top and then just go ahead and drill out the bottom so now these are both nice 3/8 holes for us to work with taking a similar approach well we got the hardware on the bracket get those springs on the bolts and then we'll compress those springs down and then we'll try to fit them into the holes here and then push them pass remember you make sure you have everything correct before you push them past or you're going to need to new Springs because they will there they're only at one time use so similar to the other side we'll go ahead and tighten this up by applying some pressure pulling out on those toggle bolts so we have some pressure on the bolts and they can start to thread into the springs and then we'll tighten them kind of back and forth top to bottom as we work our way closer to the drywall to get a nice secure fit on this right side bracket so the nice thing is once we're done with this we're gonna have four toggle bolts in this this toilet paper holder and really should give you just about as good of a secure hold as you can possibly get and it's really not that much time commitment so we'll tighten this up here and make sure everything is as fit to the drywall all right coming to the homestretch we're gonna take that right hand side of the toilet paper holder and again we'll want to finish strong here so take your time make sure the allen key is seated into into the the Allen bolt and and make sure you get a nice tight fit without stripping out the Allen bolt so you'll go ahead and secure this up just another half turn here and we'll make sure the left and right hand side are good and then we'll go ahead and insert that middle piece there that's it thanks guys for stopping by I really appreciate it and if you need a reference as always to the tools used today go ahead and look down below the video in the description and I'll list everything out for you hopefully you got a little bit out of this video and it helps you with your everyday home repairs take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 168,447

Rating: 4.7154813 out of 5

Keywords: how to fix a toilet paper holder, how to repair a loose towel rack, how to repair a loose towel rod, how to repair a loose toilet paper holder, toggle bolt, toggle bolts, using a toggle bolt to secure toilet paper holder, towel rack ripped out of drywall, towel rod ripped out of drywall, securing towel rack to drywall, securing toilet paper holder to drywall, toilet paper holder repair, repair toilet paper holder

Id: 6WCxC0lervE

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 16 2017