Earlier this week I talked about how our living room got a shake up because we (very randomly) decided to mount our TV on the wall. To make sure we liked the TV against this wall, we tested it for a few days. Ron Swanson approves.

testing tv location

We bought the Cheetah Mounts APTMM2B kit on Amazon. It was both affordable and highly rated. Win-win-win. (The third win is for the free shipping, thanks to Amazon Prime). You can find a detailed installation guide here, which is more or less exactly what we did, with a few tweaks.

First, Ryan attached brackets to the back of the TV with a Philips screwdriver and removed the plastic base of the unit.

ryan mounting tv

My biggest question for the next step: What’s the best height for a wall-mounted TV? Some Googling told me the bottom 1/3 of the set should be eye-level. With that in mind, we found the center-most studs with a stud finder, positioned it, and screwed in the wall mount. This required making pilot holes with a drill and using a ratchet tool.

Cheetah Mounts APTMM2B

Boom. Level. The Cheetah Mounts APTMM2B actually comes with a level, so now we have three levels in our house. Cool?

Cheetah Mounts APTMM2B

A brief safety note:

Anchors aren’t going to cut it for this project.

We opted to hide the TV’s many cords by running them through the wall. So with a utility knife, Ryan hacked into the drywall.

Here’s where we did things a little differently. We have antenna TV. The antenna is awesome, was only $40, picks up all over-the-air channels perfectly, and WE DON’T HAVE TO PAY A CABLE BILL. And it’s from a local company! As great as it is, we really didn’t want to mount it on the wall. Even though it’s paper thin, it’s still unattractive. So we hid in. In the kitchen. Above the cabinets. Haha.

Ryan measured the distance between the living room hole and the wall. He wanted to make sure the kitchen hole was in the same space between studs.

Once he measured the other side of the wall, he drilled a 1″ diameter hole right above the cabinets and dropped the antenna cord down for me to catch and pull through the living room hole. Both the hole and antenna are completely hidden (um, unless you’re standing on a chair. In which case, stop standing on my chair!).

SO MANY CORDS. .As you can see, another hole was cut into the wall near the power outlet. Side note: be careful with this stuff. It’s probably safest to just turn off the power when you’re cutting into a wall that close to an outlet.

Cheetah Mounts APTMM2B

We harnessed the cords and made them look pretty with one of these. Then, magic happened.

Boom. Wall mounted TV. And for the record, including all the drilling and cutting, this took less than an hour. Not bad.

Cheetah Mounts APTMM2B

Let’s take a look at the before and after.

living room wall before mounting tv

Well, okay, so it’s not really an ‘after’ so much as it’s the weird in-between part of the process. We want to get a piece of furniture under the set so we can hide the computer and add general storage to the living room.

Here’s the other corner of the room.

And now, an aerial view, shot from our Goodyear blimp.

living room proposed layout

I’m feeling pretty good about it. Aren’t you? Yeah you are.

Have you ever mounted a tv in your house? How did it go?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *