Meanwhile at Sage’s House….

With all the focus on our kitchen since…January…the rest of our house has been a bit neglected. Nowhere is this more true than in our bedroom. And lately, things have been looking really bad. Our dresser is but one example:

How did we get to this place of chaos and despair? Well, we used to have three TVs in our house: one in the living room, one in Sam’s study, and one in the basement gym. (That seems like a lot of TVs for two people….) Then the one in the basement broke. We managed to convince the manufacturer to fix it even though the warranty had just expired, but we had to pay for shipping and the whole thing took like 6 weeks to fix and return to us. But it was wintertime when I was using the treadmill frequently for marathon training (womp womp), and we just had to buy a replacement in the meantime or I would have gone crazy.

When the fixed one arrived back at the house, we had no idea what to do with it…four TVs for two people seems even more absurd than three TVs for two people or two TVs for two people. Mostly we just wanted to hold onto it for when one of the other TVs breaks, but in the meantime we had to put it somewhere. We’ve never had a TV in our bedroom, but that seemed like the only logical place for it since that was one of the only frequently-used rooms without a TV. So we plopped it on the dresser very unceremoniously, where it sat for many months.

We don’t have cable in there or anything, just occasionally we will use an HDMI cord to stream a movie off of one of our laptops since we have a window AC unit in our bedroom and thus it’s a nice cool retreat on some of these really hot days (we also have central air but we prefer not to run it).

But the messy dresser with TV-in-front-of-mirror combo was not working for me, and so in my frenzy of cleaning up for our summer party a few weeks ago I finally took an hour to get things organized.

First, I bought a TV wall mounting bracket. The one I ordered was just $11 on Amazon (affiliate link – read our policies):

Next I removed the mirror. I like that mirror, but we already have a full-length mirror in our bedroom and it’s not like it’s useable stuck behind the TV anyway. Then I mounted the TV bracket following the instructions.

It was pretty straightforward. The bracket includes one mounting piece, which you bolt into studs. It has a level built onto it so it’s easy to install straight. I used a studfinder to locate two studs, marked their location on the wall with vertical lines, then held the mounting piece on the wall to mark where the holes overlapped with the studs I’d found.

Next I drilled four holes for the bolts in the places I’d marked.

I used my handy socket set to attach the mounting piece to the wall with the bolts (my socket set remains one of the tools I swear all homeowners need):

Then I needed to attach the perpendicular brackets to the back of the TV. The TV came with four holes in the back for this very purposes:

And the mounting kit came with a variety of screws that match the most commonly-sized holes in the back of TVs.

I was lucky enough to find ones that worked with my TV, and then I used the little multi-sized washers that came with the kit since my screws would have slid through the holes on the back of the perpendicular brackets:

The perpendicular brackets have little hooks on them that let you just hook them onto the wall-mounted piece and then slide it side-to-side to center it however you want. Quite easy!

I realize there is still an ugly cord hanging down, but I didn’t want to do any more damage to the walls (or spend more money) with a cord hiding kit since this may just be temporary until we need the TV elsewhere.

I also cleaned up my jewelry a bit. That included throwing away the foamcore jewelry bust I’ve had for years, which was one of my very first DIYs.

I will always remember it fondly, but I wanted to reduce some clutter. Everything on the bust found a new home in my jewelry armoire (which I also want to replace with something smaller, but in the meantime relocated to another wall) or in a few dishes I have on the dresser. The gold dish in the middle is all my broken earrings I need to fix someday….

It’s not like I’ve created a perfectly styled dresser (unless you think piles of paperwork and a tissue box make for a good vignette), but it’s world’s better than before and it cost $11! And right now, that’s about where my standards are.