10 Cool Ways To Find Wood and Metal Studs in Walls

• Tweet

• Tweet

Having trouble finding a stud in a wall is an almost universally shared problem that most homeowners have experienced more than once.

Even people who don’t have any idea how houses are built know that to hang something really heavy you almost always need to screw or nail into a stud and not just Sheetrock or plaster. Almost all homes built in the last hundred years or so have been built using a wooden or metal framing structure which is filled with insulation on the outside and covered for protection. Inside the home all that framing is usually covered with drywall now for a variety of reasons. The wooden (or in some cases metal) framing within the walls of a home or building are generically called “studs”.

Whether you’re hanging a heavy picture frame, hanging drywall over an existing wall, mounting a heavy bookshelf or mounting a flat screen TV, you’ll want to make sure that your nails or screws go through your drywall and into one of those framing studs because the studs can hold a whole lot more weight than drywall ever could. On a side note, always try to be careful when drilling into walls because you can never be 100% sure of where electrical wire was run.

The problem, though, is that studs are largely invisible to the naked eye because they’re behind all those smooth walls. It’s easier to find studs behind drywall than any other sort of material, but if you’re tricky you can almost always find studs behind plaster and lath walls as well with a few of the methods described below.

1. Electronic Stud Finder

The easiest way to find studs is to use an Electronic Stud Finder. These little devices are pretty affordable now and they are usually pretty accurate in most cases. You simply turn them on and slowly move them horizontally across your wall. When they find a “more dense” area behind a wall they assume (usually correctly) that a stud is there and indicate as much. Newer stud finders can do all sorts of things like scan for metal (ferrous or non-ferrous) behind the walls (pipes, brackets, rebar) and detect live electrical wires (a good feature to have for safety). Generally, the more you pay for an electronic stud finder, the more accurate it will be. Plaster and lath walls often throw off most electronic stud finders because the thickness of a plaster on most walls is not uniform like Sheetrock. That being said, some homeowners report that the higher end electronic stud finders can detect studs even behind plaster and lath.

2. Magnetic Stud Finder

There are a couple different versions of magnetic stud finder, but they all work the same way. A magnet either wobbles or sticks to the wall where there are nails or screws underneath it. These magnetic stud finders sometimes work better with plaster and lath walls. Once the magnet finds a nail or screw beneath the wall you know your stud is up and down in a straight line from the magnet.

3. Knocking Method

This isn’t a 100% foolproof method for finding studs, but I’ve had good luck with it. Simply lightly knock on the wall with your knuckle, slowly inching horizontally across the wall. If you knock and move constantly you should notice a slight change in pitch as you move across a stud. I find that when I’m knocking across a part of the wall that has a stud behind it the sound of the knock gets a teeny bit lower. – electronic razor/other item?

4. Look for Bumps, Ridges and Waves in your Walls

You can visually inspect your walls and in some cases actually see where a nail head or screw is bumping out. Don’t assume that every bump is a nail into a stud, though. I once found a nail head under some paint and guessed it was a stud. When I drove a screw into the wall it almost went right through. Turns out one of the previous homeowners had just banged a nailed into the wall and painted over it! I usually look for a couple nails or bumps in a row before I determine if a stud is there or not. One trick for finding ridges is to turn on a flashlight and lay it against the wall, allowing the light to spread across it. Most little wall imperfections will show up as you roll the flashlight back and forth on the wall.

5. Look For Baseboard Nails

If you happen to have baseboards (not all rooms do anymore) then you might be able to get down and take a look at where the nails are in them. Usually when you install baseboards in a room you try to drive the nails into studs so that the baseboards will remain secure and hold. Some people suggest looking at the nails in crown molding as well, but I wouldn’t suggest relying on that because crown molding is sometimes nailed into a hidden wooden ridge instead of studs (the hidden track is nailed into studs).

6. Check the Outlets and Light Switches

Another way of finding studs is to find a light switch or electrical outlet in the room and taking the plate off. If you peek in there you might be able to see a nail or screw from one side of the box going into a stud. Switches and outlets are almost always initially installed against a stud for stability. Switches are slightly more reliable for this than electrical outlets in my experience because there are now electrical boxes you can install in the middle of wall without the need for a stud.

7. Check the Air Vents and Returns

If there are any air vents or air returns on the walls in your room then you might want to remove the grate and look to see how they’re attached. Most air vents in walls are usually nailed or screwed into a stud and in a lot of homes the air returns (usually bigger than the vents in a room) often have a stud on either side of them. In fact, it used to be common practice to use the space between two studs as the a sort of duct for the air return, so carpenters could just cut a hole in the wall and attach a grate to it.

8. Move From the Corners

Both the inside and outside corners of most rooms are going have studs in them, so you can sometimes make a pretty good guess about where the studs are in a wall by measuring out from a corner. Most of the time you can measure about 16 inches away from the corner and get pretty close to a stud. That’s what “16 inches on center” real means – studs are placed so that the center of one stud is 16 inches away from the center of another.

9. The Hole and Hanger Method

I would save these last two methods as last resorts, but they can work. Unbend a wire coat hanger and then your electric drill with a small drill bit. Near the bottom of the wall, right above your baseboards, drill a small hole at a sharp angle to the right or left, wherever you think a stud might be. Again, be mindful of electrical wires. Now stick that wire coat hanger in the hole until you hit something solid – that should be a stud! You can use the coat hanger to poke around a little bit to be sure. Mark the spot on the coat hanger that’s sticking out of the wall, pull out the hanger you’ll have an approximate measure as to how far over you have to go to reach a stud. You can then patch the hole in your wall and it probably won’t even be noticeable because it’s so low.

10. Holes In A Line Method

When all else fails, you might have to resort to outright drilling tiny holes into a wall every inch or so until you finally hit something more than empty space and insulation. This is rare and in all my years of home ownership I’ve never really had to resort to it. A variation of this is to take a large razor and stick it into your wall and move slowly in one direction, putting a slit in your wall until you hit something solid. This won’t work very well with a plaster and lath wall (the plaster would probably crumble) and you have to be really careful for live wires, but it is a method that you could use if your other nine options aren’t yielding any results.

In most cases you’ll want to use a couple of these methods together. I regularly look for bumpy nail heads and do the knocking test before I pull out the electronic stud finder. Whatever method you use, it’s often helpful to mark both edges of the stud with painter’s tape or a chalk or pencil mark so that you can do a pretty good job of approximating the center of a stud. These methods can obviously also be used to find ceiling joists in most modern homes as well.

Again, most studs are arranged to that the center from one stud measures 16 inches (sometimes 24 inches) away from the center of the next stud over. Most studs in walls are about 1.5 inches wide, but in older homes, especially those with plaster and lath walls, the studs might be a full 2 inches wide.

And remember that there are certain parts of a room where you’ll almost always find some solid framing beneath the walls. As I mentioned above, most corners will have some sort of stud behind them, though some corners may also have metal corner guards beneath the paint, so you may not be able to easily drill or nail something into them. You’ll almost always find studs around and above and below doors, doorways and windows and around the edges of structural parts of a room like half walls and headers.

With a combination of visual cues, a few little tricks, some specialized tools and a little patience you can almost always find a stud in most walls.

This entry was posted on September 4, 2009 at 3:26 am and is filed under Products, Reviews and Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.