Hanging pictures on crumbly plaster walls for the DIY-challenged?

Need to hang a couple of framed pictures on our crumbly plaster walls. They are a bit heavier than I would trust with the 3M stick-on hangers. I’ve recently patched the eleventy-thousand holes I made trying to get a curtain rail to stay up up with rawlplugs, so I know it is pretty crumbly. And that I’m pretty useless at this.

Thinking a normal picture hook, but with a long-ish drywall screw instead of a nail. Any other/better ideas?

If there’s brick behind there, drill until you’re into solid, rawlplug with a squirt of glue/caulk/silicon/whatever’s open and a screw. If it’s lath and plaster, good luck and fischer fixings, or you could glue a batten to the wall with nomorenails stuff and screw into that.

 glue a batten to the wall with nomorenails stuff and screw into that.

is a very good idea if the wall is really that poor

It’s plaster straight on to stone. Batten + glue sounds like best plan then. Thanks!

Take a snap of the pictures on your phone and look at them when the mood takes you, then take the offending masterpieces to a charity shop.

Instead of a short length of timber, you can cut a board just smaller than the frame for maximum glue area too.

CT1, Sticks Like Sh1t, Soudall Fix All
Any of these should be more than capable of holdong a picture. If the board pulls the plaster off then a long dot and dab pb fixing imto the stone should do it.
For voids, Grip Its seem popular

It’s plaster straight on to stone. Batten + glue sounds like best plan then. Thanks!

A longer drill so you’re into the stone then plug and screw. If you’re unsure about your ability to locate the plug properly in the stone using something like a Corefix fitting will ensure the plug expansion doesn’t load the plaster.

I’m not a big fan of gluing battens and boards onto plaster, it’s very messy if you ever change your mind sometime in the future. Or if you find your plaster’s even worse than you thought and the batten pulls away, though tbh if it’s that bad replastering might not be a bad idea anyway.

if you have a decent high power drill and quality drill bit the plaster should not be a problem. Drill in until you hit something solid then keep going. If the plaster is a mess then patch it with filler afterwards. The idea is the plug is in the solid bit and the screw goes in and expands in that hole. Plaster is just to look neat – use filler to get in back to neat.

The last two houses I’ve lived in have been Victorian, with plaster that long since dried out, so any attempt to hang anything on an internal wall results in clouds of dessicated plaster and horsehair, and then about half a pound of filler being used to repair the inevitable.

It’s got to the point where I mix the filler ready to go and just excavate a hole and embed the rawlplug into it using the filler, smooth off and sand down when dry, and then fit whatever you need. That seems to work.

Drill in until you hit something solid then keep going

Basically this but the key point is…

Don’t turn the hammer action on until you hit the masonry or you’ll signing your name with the drill bit as it wanders all over the shop.