How to Hang a Mirror on a Concrete or Brick Wall in NZ

To hang a mirror on a concrete or brick wall, confirm the wall really is solid masonry, drill with a hammer drill and a masonry bit sized to your wall plug, set a plug and screw rated for your wall at each hanging point, and check the fixings take the mirror's weight before you let go. The part most guides skip is the first step, and the part they cannot tell you is where your own mirror's hooks sit. This guide covers both, using the hanging hardware on the back of our own wall mirrors as the worked examples.

If your wall is plasterboard, you want our plasterboard hanging guide, which covers studs, cleats and toggles. If you rent and cannot drill, see our no drill mounting options. This page is for the walls that stop a normal drill in its tracks: poured concrete, concrete block and solid brick.

Step one: find out what your wall is actually made of

Most New Zealand homes are timber framed, so masonry inside the house is less common than people assume. It does turn up: concrete walls in apartments and townhouses, concrete block in plenty of 1960s and 1970s homes, basements and garages, and solid brick in some older homes and garage conversions. Here is how to tell which one you have in about two minutes, before you spend anything.

What you find	What it probably is	What that means for the mirror
Knock sounds solid everywhere. A test hole with a masonry bit throws fine grey dust from the first millimetre.	Solid concrete (apartments, tilt slab, basements)	Excellent holding. Standard masonry plugs work. Check for embedded services first.
A visible grid of rectangular blocks, often painted. Grey dust, and the bit may suddenly lurch forward partway in.	Concrete block	Some cells are filled solid with grout and some are hollow. A lurch means you hit a hollow cell, which needs a different plug.
Brick pattern inside the room. Red or orange dust.	Solid brick	Good holding in the brick itself. Keep fixings out of the mortar joints.
Brick outside, but inside the wall sounds hollow between firm spots and the drill goes through a thin white layer easily.	Brick veneer: plasterboard on a timber frame, with the brick outside a cavity	Not a masonry job. Use the plasterboard method and fix into the studs.
Hollow knock, the bit passes through 10 to 13mm of soft white board, then hits something very hard.	Plasterboard lining fixed over concrete	Masonry job, but the plug must be long enough for its gripping length to sit in the concrete, not in the lining.

If you are still unsure, drill one small test hole somewhere the mirror will cover, and look at the dust. White powder then hard resistance means lining over masonry. White powder all the way means plasterboard. Grey or red dust from the start means you are in the right guide.

Three checks before you drill anything

Cables and pipes. Run a cable and pipe detector over the area, and stay out of the zones directly above and below switches and power points, where cables usually run. In concrete walls, conduits can be cast in, so a detector is worth using even when the wall looks plain.

Your body corporate. In an apartment or unit title townhouse, some walls may be common property rather than yours to drill. Check your body corporate rules first. The Unit Titles website explains how common property and operational rules work.

The mirror's weight and hooks. Find the weight on the product page and turn the mirror over. The number, type and position of the hooks decide how many holes you drill and how precise they need to be. That is the next section.

Match the fixings to the hooks on your mirror

Two mirrors can weigh the same and still need quite different fixing plans. Here are the three hanging systems on the back of our wall mirrors, photographed from the real products.

Mirror	Weight	Hooks	Where the risk sits on masonry
Bastia X and Bastia Aurelia, 200 x 100cm	29kg	2 keyholes near the crown, roughly 10 to 12cm apart on our product photos	All 29kg rides on two fixings in a small patch of wall. On brick, one hole can easily land in a mortar joint. On block, one can land over a hollow cell and the other over a filled one. Test both holes, not just one.
Tivoli X, 200 x 100cm	29kg	2 keyholes, one near each top corner, roughly 95cm apart	Level. A few millimetres of error across 95cm shows straight away along a grid of 18 panes. Use a long level and mark both points from one line.
Aure Round, 100cm	12kg	D ring hangers on the backing	Light enough for standard plugs in any sound masonry. Give each D ring its own screw so the mirror cannot swing off level.

Measure your own mirror rather than trusting a photo: hook positions can vary a little between batches. What matters is the distance between the hooks and the distance from the top edge of the mirror down to the top of each keyhole slot. You will use both in a minute.

Both window mirrors are also designed to lean, so if your wall fails any of the checks on this page, leaning is a supported option rather than a compromise.

What you need

• A hammer drill (a standard drill will not get through concrete or brick cleanly)
• Masonry drill bits in the diameter printed on your plug packet
• Masonry wall plugs and matching screws. For keyholes, choose a screw whose head passes through the round part of the keyhole and whose shank fits snugly in the narrow slot. For hollow block, use plugs made for hollow walls.
• A spirit level, ideally 1m long for a mirror as wide as the Tivoli
• Tape measure, pencil, painter's tape and a cable and pipe detector
• A vacuum or a hand pump to clear dust from the holes
• Safety glasses and hearing protection
• A second person. A 200cm, 29kg mirror is a two person lift, every time.

How to hang it, step by step

1. Pick the height. Decide where the top of the mirror should sit. Under a standard 2.4m ceiling, a 200cm mirror hung with about 20cm of clear wall below it puts its top at about 220cm.
2. Make a template. Lay the mirror face down on a blanket. Run a strip of painter's tape across the back over both hooks, and mark the top of each keyhole's narrow slot on the tape. That is where each screw shank will end up. Write the distance from the mirror's top edge down to those marks on the tape too.
3. Transfer to the wall. Your fixing height is the height you chose for the top of the mirror, minus that top edge distance. Stick the tape to the wall at that height, check it with the level, and mark both points through the tape.
4. Check the marks. Run the detector over each mark again. On brick, if a mark sits in a mortar joint, move the whole template sideways a little so both points land in brick. On block, drill slowly and feel for a lurch that tells you the cell is hollow.
5. Drill. Put a small cross of tape over each mark to stop the bit wandering. Start with hammer action off to make a small dimple, then switch it on. Wrap tape round the bit to mark the depth: the plug's length plus about 10mm. Keep the drill square to the wall.
6. Clear the dust. Vacuum or blow out each hole. Plugs grip the sides of a clean hole far better than a dusty one.
7. Set the plugs. Tap each plug in with a hammer until it sits flush with the wall surface. If it spins or slides in loosely, the hole is too big or you are in a void: move the fixing, do not force a bigger plug into a bad hole.
8. Drive the screws, then back them off. Screw in fully, then back each screw out so the head stands just far enough off the wall for the keyhole plate to slip behind it, usually a few millimetres. Keep both screws at the same projection.
9. Hang with two people. Lift the mirror together, guide both keyholes over the screw heads, and lower it until both shanks sit at the top of their slots. Keep hold while you run the load check below. If the mirror leans out at the top, take it down and tighten each screw a quarter turn at a time until it sits flat.

The load check before you let go

With the mirror on its hooks and both of you still holding it, ease your grip gradually rather than letting go all at once. Watch the top of the frame for movement and listen for any creak from the fixings. Then press gently down on the top of the frame with both hands. Nothing should move. If anything shifts, lift the mirror off and fix the problem now, while it is a small job.

Look at the load figure printed on the plug packet for your wall type, and check it against our rule of thumb: the fixings together should be rated for at least twice the mirror's weight. For a 29kg Bastia or Tivoli, that means at least 58kg combined. For the 12kg Aure, at least 24kg. If your plugs do not state a figure for your wall type, choose ones that do.

Common mistakes on masonry

• Treating brick veneer as brick. The brick is on the outside. Inside, it is plasterboard, and masonry plugs in plasterboard will not hold a mirror.
• Drilling into mortar. Mortar is softer than brick and crumbles around a plug. Keep both fixings in the brick.
• Using one fixing for two hooks. Every hook gets its own fixing. That keeps the mirror level and shares the weight.
• Short plugs through a lining. Where plasterboard sits over concrete, a short plug grips the board, not the wall behind it.
• Leaving dust in the hole. It is the quiet reason plugs pull out months later.

When to get a hand, or lean it instead

Call a handyman if the wall is crumbling or badly cracked, if a hole keeps breaking into voids, if you find services where the mirror needs to go, or if you simply do not want to lift 29kg of glass and iron at head height. A competent installer usually has a mirror like this up in under an hour.

And remember the easy option. The Bastia X, Bastia Aurelia and Tivoli X are made to lean as confidently as they hang, so a wall you would rather not drill is no reason to go without. For a leaning mirror in a busy home, a discreet wall tether is still a good idea.

The mirrors in this guide

Frequently asked questions