How to Mount a Flat Screen TV | Ask This Old House

[Music] hey nathan hey kevin how's it going oh you getting ready to mount my tv i can if you want me to sure why not so we get a lot of questions about tv mounts so i thought it'd be great to cover three basic tv mounts here okay so we have a fixed this is great if you're going to hang your tv right in front of you you don't have to go above anything you can go with that model tilting is great if you have to go above a mantle a fireplace maybe an entertainment center bring it down tilt it down better line of sight and here's the uh all the bells and whistles the full motion model now this is great if your tv is maybe in the corner you need to bring it out you can also get a lot more adjustment with the tilting and even get a little bit of left to right through this to level it out which one you want to install today let's go with the full motion but the first thing we need to do is find some studs so drywall just a drywall wall really easy easiest way to find studs two different ways electronic just turn it on run it across this one's really nice because this will actually pinpoint the exact center of the stud right there we'll make a mark another option is to just go old school use a magnet this one's really simple it's going to find the screw that's embedded in the drywall so you find one of those on this side come over to another stud we found another one there those should be 16 on center now that we have that we can do our plum marks down bring the bracket over and mount that let's go old school one there oh that thing really grabs it doesn't it yeah right there we want to confirm a little bit more 16 and a quarter so these screws might not be perfectly in the center but that's definitely close enough for us yep okay so now we'll bring over our level and we'll just plumb these lines down so we're just giving ourselves a bigger mark to hit yep the mount is about nine inches from hold the hole beautiful okay cover that so now we have this so you got a couple holes there and this bracket actually comes with a little little level on it oh nice a little picture hanging level so come my way a little bit you tell me where you like nice and level there okay all right so now these lags are pretty thick so i'm going to use a eighth inch bit i'm going to pre-drill [Music] and that's when you know if you got the stud or not yeah that's going to pop right through if you missed the stud [Music] now we have our lag bolts washer on top let's see what you got there i mean that's a that's a beefy bolt right there right i mean this is gonna be holding a lot of weight so they give you the right ones use them yeah and you need to pay attention when you're buying your mounts that you need to know the weight of your tv now we can go put the plate on the back of the tv all right so here's the tv i brought in it's a little bit older don't make fun of it so you can see it has these threaded receivers on the back right which is pretty standard right very standard so it's part of a visa standard and every tv should have a visa standard and it's just the distance from hold a hole in millimeters okay so these brackets are for our larger tv we're actually not going to use these but we will talk about them simply mount these on the back and then those crossbars will get mounted this way and then this plate will get mounted onto that so you can hit a of visa standards and the reason you have them is because the bigger tvs these threaded inserts could be much further apart top to bottom exactly and then we could be going left to right a bunch yep yeah so you can work with a bunch of different manufacturers we've got so many different holes you're probably going to hit your threaded inserts exactly regardless of what tv you use luckily for us my old tv we'll just toss this plate right on the back and you can see it lines up with all four of those threaded inserts okay so we'll just grab a washer now another thing to keep in mind is some of the newer tvs have a bit of a curve back to them so you can see in that kit they have some rubber spacers oh yeah so you would put those on behind this bracket so that way you don't crush the back gotcha you can see that we just mounted this directly to the studs that are 16 ounce center but it puts our center line over here so if we wanted this to be centered over a mantel or a fireplace that wouldn't quite work for us but the problem is this moves in 16 inch increments left and right because we want to hit the studs with the bracket exactly so a cheat around that is to inlay a piece of half inch plywood onto the studs so you screw the plywood on and then that gives you the chance to move this left to right so plywood the studs and then bracket the plywood exactly anywhere you want that plywood needs to be wider a little bit wider smaller than the tv but wider that gives you a chance to move this to put this center line exactly where you want got it okay another thing i want to talk about is cable management so this would be the time for you to put any boxes top and bottom that you wanted you know where your studs are you can chase your cables right down so you want to bring your power up you can also run your hdmi cord you can run your cable um this would be the time to do that if you don't want to do that you could just do some wire mold gotcha surface mount wire mold okay ready to hang let's do it give you a hand with it but it's such a small tv okay oh it just fits right in there yeah and then once it's in there i mean this is the full motion right left come out right right up and down up down forward and back send it home and then just tuck it in when you're done at the end yep so pretty straightforward just make sure you got the right hardware it really is but you just got to consider size your tv weight of your tv and the visa layout on the back before you buy any of your mounts all right thank you nathan no problem thanks for watching this whole house has got a video for just about every home improvement project so be sure to check out the others and if you like what you see click on the subscribe button make sure that you get our newest videos right in your feed

Channel: This Old House

Views: 26,825

Keywords: This Old House, DIY, Construction, Home Improvement, Ask This Old House, Building, Nathan Gilbert, Kevin O'Connor, flat-screen TV, walls

Id: YBjTcUSaDsk

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2022