I'm nearly ready now to come back again

[venta]

Those of you who have visited our flat will know that we inherited a rather over-blown 1920's bathroom from the previous inhabitant. In the first instance I found it terrifying, but have grown to love its green and jet black tiling.

Anyway, it's lit by four wall lamps, each with a large white glass globe. This morning I took off my dressing gown and somehow managed to flail an arm such that I hit one of the globes.

Oops.

I tried to catch it as it fell, fumbled, missed, and waited for the smash as it hit the tiled floor.

And waited.

Err?

Of course, the globe is screwed to the light fitting. You can't knock it off. What you can do is wrench the entire fitting from the wall and leave it dangling on its wires.

The previous inhabitant was something of a DIY-er, we think. And this light reveals more of his work. The holes in the wall are huge, big enough to fit a finger in, with the rawl plugs packed in with slivers of wood. To be honest, I'm slightly surprised the light didn't fall off the wall years ago.

But now we have the problem of fixing it. Anyone have any advice on filling large holes in walls? I'm worried that Polyfilla might just form a large plug that will pull straight back out again.

Comments

[shermarama]

My walls in Brighton were generally impossible to not drill a huge wide hole in, because they were made of crumbly stuff with a random flint element, which tended to send the drill bit off sideways. My solution was a multi-stage process which went: 1) drill a big messy hole, 2) saturate the inside of the hole with diluted PVA, which binds the surface layers together a bit and eliminates dustiness, 3) once that had dried, backfill the hole with polyfilla, 4) once that had dried, drill a neat hole in the polyfilla. The whole process then took a couple of days, off and on, but seemed to produce solid enough results.