A Television Story

We didn’t have curbside recycling at our apartment so, being green-minded 20-somethings, we would trek our bags of cans, bottles, and glass along with old cardboard boxes over to the recycling center on Saturday mornings. One day, on the way, we decided to run some errands and happened to be driving by one of those appliance, mattress, tv stores.

Leading up to this point, Kayla and I, well, probably mostly I had spent quite a number of hours oohing and ahhing at all the beautiful flat panel LCD TVs. I had an old 19” mammoth-of-a-beast thing that I was just sick of. 

It belonged on a Goodwill shelf.

We popped in and within an hour, we walked out with a gorgeous 52” flat panel. The one we picked was a lightly-used floor model (they kicked in a 5 year warranty for free because of this!). The kind clerk loads the TV on the cart and I skip out to the car to pull it up front. About five skips away from the car I remember that it’s full of trash and there wasn’t going to be too much room for the TV. I pull up, open up the back, and the clerk shoots me a look like I just pinched his girlfriend’s butt. I let out a little giggle, timidly look down to the left, shrug my shoulders and say, it’ll be fine! We somehow manage to squeeze a brand new, sexy, expensive piece of technology into the midst of trash.

Since we were renters at our last place, we didn’t get the chance to mount the TV on the wall like I had always dreamed, so it sat on two old bedside tables that actually look pretty good. There is no picture of this because Kayla, while fond of the TV in terms of viewer experience (she may have jumped up and down when we bought it), was not fond of the way it actually looked in our living room. She's in the middle of trying to "disguise" it on our current wall also. I'm going to let her try.

Now that I own the plaster, the first thing I did was hang that sucker on the wall. I bought a trusty wall mount off of the interwebs for $19, found the studs and drilled away. It looked fantastic!...if you were right in front of it. If you took a few steps back you’d realize that it was a foot too high and crooked. Darn it!

I spent the rest of the night convincing myself that it was fine where it was. “It’s good that it’s high, right….right?! Is it warm in here?”

Well, fast-forward four months – I’ve fought off the snickers long enough and now it was time to make some adjustments. Kayla helped me lift the TV off the wall (see: kayla’s guns) and I got my drill, socket wrench and keyhole saw and went to work.



*Kayla's Guns



I had a couple of metal re-work brackets for the wall to line the hole, but I didn’t want to make it too big and then have the bracket be loose, so I followed a motto that runs deep in my family. Measure twice, cut 47 times. A little here, a little there, measure again, cut a little bit more… this goes on for far too long, but soon enough I get a perfect sized hole in the wall for the wires hidden directly behind the TV.





After this was done, I moved the bracket down the wall and this time I didn’t follow the bubble on the built-in bracket for levelness as the ceiling is a little off and went by my handy-dandy tape measure. With Kayla’s help, I fed the wires through and got everything plugged in all nicey-nice and then hung the soundbar on the wall as well so it wasn’t just plopped on top of the bedside, *ahem* entertainment unit.


The TV is now at optimum viewing height with no wires exposed and if I wasn’t me, I’d pat me on the back.