We visited Ikea last week and decided to buy a pair of storage cabinets that go together end to end to form one long cabinet. The whole business together is about 8 feet long and maybe 20 inches high. The idea is that this is fastened to the wall (look Ma no legs). This is accomplished by attaching to the wall at six separate points along the eight feet.
After assembling the unit, we placed it and I set to work drilling and anchoring. The screws had to go in specific spots in the unit and the unit had to go in a specific spot in the room. Now you might expect that with 6 opportunities, I would hit at least one stud, right? Har! No way. No problem. I got these plastic super-duper anchors that go through the drywall then open up behind it. Each one was good for 80 pounds. There were 6 of them, so I should be good for 480 pounds right? Right. So I positioned the unit and put in the anchors and screwed the whole business into the wall. It looked great.
Tuffy P put our little orchid collection up on it and I was pretty happy. That was before it crashed to the ground with great vengeance, smashing the orchid containers along the way.
Today I cut out a section of drywall big enough to screw a piece of strapping into the studs, then screwed the unit into the strapping. The house will fall down before the unit does. Obviously I should have done this in the first place. C’est la vie.
27th Street 
Salvelinas Fontinalis, that is a brilliant solution.
I’ve been hanging 50 plus shelves in my new library/guest room. Wanted to get closer to the ceiling than I would with a premade unit. Anyway discovered the secret of toggle bolts – just drill holes the size of your fist.
When those shelves come down, the walls will look like swiss cheese. I don’t care. It’s my damn house. My damn books. My damn guests being forced to look at my books and wonder if the shelves will crash on their heads. That’s the kind of awesome hostess that I am.
Poor orchids.
Oh, fracking IKEA! I’m not surprised this happened to you. I have had such bad luck with stuff from that place I won’t buy any more furniture from them!
Heh, for future reference there is a fairly simple way to handle the problem without needing to rip out drywall. I’ll see if I can describe it without a diagram. Cut a nice straight fairly knot free piece of 1 x 4 or even 1 x 6 the same length or a wee bit shorter than the thing you want to attach to the wall. Then rip this board down the length of it in half but instead of making a square cut make the cut at a 45 degree angle. A table saw works best if you have one or have a neighbor who has one but even a jigsaw will do the job. The cut doesnt need to be perfect because the 2 pieces will eventually mate up again. So now you have 2 lengths of wood each with a pointy side. The idea is to find some studs and screw one of the pieces to the wall solidly so that it is pointy side up with the pointy side away from the wall and the lower edge of that 45 degree angle against the wall. The other half of the board will now slide pointy side down against the wall in the groove made by the piece you screwed to the wall. So the plan is to take that second piece and screw it snugly to the thing you want to hang on the wall, pointy side down. Ok you have to put a bit of thought into exactly where you need to screw the wall piece as well as where you want to screw the piece to the back of the wall unit, but when you are done you can simply lift the unit up against the wall and let it slide down until it locks into place on the wall mounted board. This makes a surprisingly solid installation and works with things like heavy framed mirrors etc.. You might want a piece of 1 x 2 strapped near the bottom as a spacer. The nice thing about this system is the weight of the unit is what holds it in place, yet you can just lift it off the wall mounted board if you ever want to move it and you dont really care where the studs are as long as you can find some.
As it turned out, taking out the piece of drywall only took 10 minutes or so, and I think we’re solid now.