Living Room: Declutter

The Problem

I recently had the urge to declutter our living room a bit. Mostly tyding up the situation around the TV and in general removing a bit of “stuff”. The living room is in the first floor of our house – next to the “reading room” – and only separated from it by the wooden beams of the half-timbered structure.

The Plan

The plan was to create a bit more separation between the two rooms. Initially I planned to do that by covering up the left side of the half-timbered structure using a wooden board. Following a bit of prototyping using a piece of cloth I decided against the idea and focussed on creating the separation only by mounting the TV on the wall.

The easiest solution would probably have been to mount a smaller wooden board across the middle opening and attach the wall mount, that was included with the TV, to it.

Call me esoteric, but I really like to avoid putting screws into 300 year old beams so I was looking for a non-invasive way to mount the TV.

The Idea

After two days I finally had an idea – a bit inspired by how flower boxes are attached to balconies – I wanted to build two hooks that would hang on the horizontal wooden beams where I could mount the TV to using its VESA mounting threads. So I quickly put together a sketch in Figma to get some feedback from my family.

The Work

I ordered 2 pieces of flat steel: 30mm x 3mm and bent them using the edge of my work bench and a vice. Bending worked out quite well and I didn’t need things to be perfect (e.g. smaller corner radius) anyways.

Next I needed to drill the holes for the VESA mounting threads. Our TV uses the 200x200 standard. To make sure I don’t mess up the vertical alignment I’ve drawn a quick sketch in Figma again to help with the measurements. I naively tried the drill bits we had lying around in the shed – some of them still from my grandfather and labeled “Made in West Germany” and got to work. Turns out: I merely was able to scratch the steel’s surface. Luckily we have a small hardware store in our village so I ended up with fitting drill bits and some good advice:

“Steel takes time”.

Now I only needed to attach the hooks to the TV and hang everything to the beams.

The Result

To get a nice clean look we decided to get a new TV – Samsung The Frame with a white frame. It’s main advantage being a matte display and the fact that there is only one cable that needs to be attached to the TV – and all the peripherals gets plugged into a separated connect box.