Big TV, Big Pain in the Ass

Eric and I thought we were so smart, that is the irony of it all. Way back when the walls were being framed out we decided to run all the wiring for our kick ass home entertainment system. We ran all the speaker cables for front, center and rear speaker that could be mounted directly on the wall; we put in electrical boxes for TV power, HDMI and Ethernet and ran the various cable while the wall was still accessible. Then the sheetrock was put up, plastered, sanded and painted and we thought we would just buy a big TV at a later date, hang it on the wall real quick, connect the cables and be done that easily. Ah, to be young and stupid again.

We planned on getting a 59 inch Samsung LCD until we saw the 63 inch Samsung plasma for half the cost. The reviews were great so we went to see it in person at Best Buy. Eric, the guy who barely ever watches TV was entranced and as we left the store he said to me (under his breath, yet extremely earnestly) "We MUST have that TV!" So about 45 days ago I bought it from an online discount site and it was delivered without incident. We had read that the TV weighed about 150 pounds and figured we could handle that load together, but what they don't tell you is that the TV comes attached to the stand and that adds another 75 pounds to the weight. Eric and I just couldn't handle that weight in such an awkward shape together so the TV sat on the floor still attached to the stand for a while. But that wasn't our biggest issue.

Eric started reading up on techniques for mounting big, heavy TV's on walls and quickly realized that we were extremely ill prepared. The wall we wanted to mount to was brick behind, but the framed out with metal studs. Now metal studs are fine for most applications, but you just can't hang any real weight on them. So the entire wall needed to come down so Eric could sister the metal studs on either side with wood studs and then attached the wood studs directly to the brick wall behind. It sounds simple doesn't it? It was anything but. Eric wrecked his wrist and hands for about a week with all the effort it took to attach to that brick.

Eric worked tirelessly for days on end on this framing while I dealt with Vincent's illness. When he was done beefing up the wall it looked like it does above. He stepped onto one of the 2x4's and hung all of his weight off of it and the wall didn't budge a millimeter. We figured it was strong enough to the hold the TV at that point. But then we had to reconstruct the wall and mount all the cable boxes again.

We put a large piece of plywood behind where the TV mount would attach and then pieced the rest of the wall together in sheetrock.

Once that was done it looked like this:

A lot of joint compound and sanding later it looked like this:

Then we painted the wall the Ralph Lauren Townhouse red that is in the guest room and got the wall ready to hang the mount. Unfortunately we quickly realized this was a 3 person job at minimum so we bribed our favorite subcontractor Alex (the creator of our fine metal stairs, front gates, front doors, etc) with some tasty treats so he would come over and give us a hand. Alex is a master himself at attaching heavy things to other things and getting them to stay so when Eric described to him how the wall was framed out Alex looked at him with a mix of incredulity and bemusement. His eyes said "Man you are a crazy maniac" but his mouth said "Yeah I don't think this TV will be going ANYWHERE" The three of us got the mount up and they picked up the TV while I supervised and provided extra support on the bottom front. It's such an awkward shape to try to hold onto and then attach to a mount, but we got it on, made some adjustment and then sat back to watch the Discovery channel in HD. WOAH!

Since then we've been super busy with the basement and haven't really watched much TV but I can confirm that the Lost season finale looked amazing in 63" HD and everything on the Discovery channel looks even cooler. The only film we've watched so far was Across the Universe which was just…mind-bogglingly awesome in so many ways, but mostly because it was huge and colorful. I have a feeling even bad movies will look good on this thing. We've got a new Samsung Blu-ray player on order and once that arrives we'll probably be watching a lot more films.

While we still need to do some paint touch-ups around it, here is the TV on the wall in all its glory:

I've put Eric's size 12 shoe on top so you can get an idea of the enormity of this thing. A picture without it just wouldn't give you any scale.

Also in our bid to complete the living room, we order a rug online from Overstock.com. Now, I will never order a rug online again, as this looks nothing like the picture on their site where the rug looked like it had varying shades of brown, red and beige. In reality the beiges are yellow, the browns are green and the bright reds are more a medium wine color. I wasn't sure about it, but it's starting to grow on me, mostly because it does seem to match the room pretty well, including our 1950's style tattoo pillows. And Vincent loves it.

But today we are slaving away in the laundry room. More on that later…

Comments

[mrslimestone]

Looks great. Hiding the wires was one of my big "musts" in our reno. Sucks you had to redo all that work but its looking really good.

[dana]

thanks!--it's good to know it was worth it. Now we just need to save up for all those wall mounted speakers. They are insanely expensive so I think we'll just be making due with the speakers in the TV for now.

[Corey]

Hanging a TV on a wall seems like such an easy thing. That was before I too ripped out the old wall since there was brick behind it, framed it, ran all the electrical and conduit so wired wouldn't show and then mounted the behoemeth. Quite a task indeed.

[dana]

glad someone else has felt the pain, Corey. Well not glad, but it's nice to commiserate. I check out your site, your house looks great. I used to live in Baltimore so it's nice to see what someone is doing with those great old row houses. The one I lived it was a hundred years old and extremely neglected, but we rented so it wasn't worth fixing anything up. Anyway, looks like you are doing a really nice job!

[Kathleen]

Sounds like a giant pain in the ass, but looks amazing.

I love the rug and think it works really well in the room. And you have the Noguchi table I want. So jealous.

Also - we have two of those little ottoman/storage cubes in our living room as well. They are fabulous, aren't they? So handy.

[dana]

hey Kathleen! How's it going? Thanks for the kudos. We might need to get rid of that Noguchi table as it's not really the right shape for the room anymore and we might need something bigger going forward. If we do I'll give you a buzz. And yes, I love the storage cubes--so awesome! I'm planning on getting two more in the near future, maybe red ones. They will serve as great extra seating if we ever have another party. Tell Atom I said hi!