Stage 4: Matt & I Do Our Thing

A good friend of mine named Matt happens to have a fair amount of experience with mounting wall displays, so I was confident with his help I get that lovely LG plasma TV up the wall without making a complete mess of things. It didn't quite turn out that way, but I swear it wasn't our fault! I bought the nicest, most expensive TV mounting bracket that the electronics store had. It would allow me to move the TV left, right, forward, and backward. Sounds cool, right? We measured the wall, and the mounting plate for the bracket, several times and started drilling. The first surprise was that we didn't find wood where we expected to. The 2x8" that the electrician was supposed to install? It seems that he decided to install a 2x6" piece of wood instead. Professional fail #2. So we lost two inches of space there. After we got that part figured out, which involved drilling a new hole in the steel mounting bracket, we mounted it without much trouble.

Figure 10: Matt and his drill. His drill is way cooler than my drill. It has more gigawatts...or something.

Figure 11: After we got it mounted we put some weight on it to ensure it would support the TV, and it was locked in there solidly. The ugly electrical outlet and Vacu-flo outlet would be covered by the TV, so I didn't put any cover plates on them.

Figure 12: Umm...dude? That doesn't quite look right!

After we put up the TV, which was a bit of a heavy beast, we immediately noticed we had a problem: it wasn't centred on the wall! It was several inches too far to the left. How did that happen you might ask? Turns out that what we didn't realize was that while the mounting bracket was perfectly centred on the wall, the part of the bracket that attaches to the TV, when pushed back to it's starting position (closest to the wall), is off centre. There's no indication on either bracket as to where the "true" centre point is, nor is there any mention of this in the article. Measuring the true centre point was quite difficult, so I got fed up and simply returned the bracket. Professional fail #3 for the salesperson not telling me this wasn't a good bracket to use over a mantle (which I told him about). In its place, I purchased a very simple mounting bracket, something that was easy to align with the centre of the mantle.