Vinyl siding, brick and uneven trim

Last updated 2026-08-28

Vinyl siding: do not drill it if you can avoid it

Siding is designed to move. It expands and contracts with temperature and hangs loosely on its fasteners so it can. A screw driven tight through a panel pins it, and the panel then buckles or cracks as it tries to move against the fastener.

A hole through siding is also a hole through the weather layer. Water that gets behind it has nowhere useful to go, and you will not see the consequences from the front.

Seam clips exist for this exact reason. They grip the lip where two panels overlap, hold the mount without a single hole, and come off leaving nothing. If your siding has an accessible horizontal seam near the door, this is the answer.

Brick and stucco: the mortar line is the target

If you must drill masonry, go into a mortar joint and not the face of a brick. Mortar is softer, it is what the wall is designed to have repointed, and a filled hole in a joint is close to invisible.

Adhesive on brick or heavy stucco is a poor bet, because the contact area is a fraction of what the tape needs. A mount that spans the texture and fixes into two mortar joints will outlast anything stuck to the surface.

Narrow trim, and the mount nobody mentions

Door casings are often narrower than the backing plate, which leaves the plate overhanging onto a different surface at a different depth. That is how a camera ends up mounted at a slight angle and pointing somewhere unhelpful.

A wedge or corner mount solves the angle. A narrow-profile plate solves the width. The two problems are separate and it is worth being clear which one you have before buying, because a wedge does not make a plate narrower.

If the camera is aimed wrongly as well as mounted awkwardly, the angle page below covers the geometry.

Related

• Mounting without drilling at all — adhesive, frame and peephole options
• The camera is pointing at the sky — wedges and angle mounts