Fitting Venetian Blind, Lintel Problem

[monkey73]

Hi all

I've bought a load of wooden venetian blinds to put up at home, all have gone up successfully, drilled mounting holes for the brackets into the brickwork around the windows, mounted brackets, and fitted blinds - easy.

However when I came to do the window in my front hall, I hit a problem. Here is the window, as you can see its in a recess with the front door but the blind only covers the window, so I planned to mount the brackets to the top of the recess. You can see where I drilled the holes. Unfortunately the picture is rotated, don't know why.

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• monkey73
• 23 Mar 2015
• 1

However when I drilled the holes, the outer holes (i.e. the ones furthest away from the window) just go into a hollow void, through the plaster there doesn't appear to be anything behind.

When I drilled the other 2 holes, both times I hit metal, i assume a steel lintel. This picture shows the result of drilling too hard and the drill slipping through a hole in the lintel.

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• monkey73
• 23 Mar 2015
• 1

My question is how can I attach these 2 brackets to the top now? I need to find a way such that a fair bit of force can be put on it as the action of raising the blind is a downward pulling action. The plaster is crumbly, not really plasterboard, it's something else I think, so hollow wall fixings probably won't work, and I need to mount anyhow in the area where the metal is.

For the right hand side bracket I could drill into the brick wall vertical and mount the bracket to the right hand recess instead of the top, but that doesn't help with the other side which doesn't have a left vertical next to it.

Anyone got a way to do it?

Thanks

 

[Robbie uk]

The brackets can be mounted from the sides, depending on how wide the blind is, the middle one might not be needed.

 

[monkey73]

No there is no middle bracket The blind only goes the width of the window, I'm trying to fit the left hand bracket to the top. I fixed the right hand bracket to the side, that was fine.

As it is, I went and bought some self tapping screws, and a new HSS drill bit and drilled two holes in the lintel and screwed in the self tappers. Seems to have done the job. I destroyed the plaster in the process as you can see so i raked it out further and infilled with a piece of wood, then filled over the top of this. The screws go through the wood and anchor in to the metal. It's all currently drying right now but seems to have done the job. It was made trickier by the fact that there were already holes in the lintel, oval shaped, so I had to carefully position the bracket where i could drill pilot holes for the screws, but not move the bracket so far away that it was too wide.

All seems fine for now, we shall see when it all goes back together tomorrow.

 

[Robbie uk]

Old houses are never easy !!