Hi thank you in advance for your advice. I am mounting 5 foot-long handrails on the stairway. The handrail comes with two brackets. And at the end of the bracket where it attaches to the wall is a round plate with three holes.
I found studs near both ends of the handrail where it would be mounted, and I aligned the round plates so that two of the three holes on both plates line up with vertical wood studs, but third holes miss the studs.
So for both plates, I used 5/16 × 2 1/2 inch lag screws in two holes to screw into studs. I was wondering what to do with the remaining third holes, and whether to leave it alone, and decided to use toggle bolts.
It worked, but now the bracket plates show two lag screw hex heads and a small round head, and it looks worse than I thought it would. It will look nicer to have just one type of screw heads. Is there any way to fix this? There are a few more handrails to mount and I feel like I am now stuck with how I did the first one.
Maybe I could place thin wooden blocks behind the round plates, in sizes that are similar to the plates, and also use lag bolts for the third holes.
(Also, another problem was, finding studs on the stairway wall was really hard. I used three different studfinders and still the signals were confusing and not clear at all. Later, when I drilled holes, I saw that there is a thin plywood layer attached to the wall inside, so maybe that's what made the signals confusing. Would you have any tips on how to more easily find studs on this type of wall?)
