The Mistakes People Make When They Mount a Television

These are decisions, not skills

Nearly everything that goes wrong with a wall-mounted television goes wrong before anyone touches the wall. That is the useful thing to understand about this list. These are not skills somebody failed to acquire. They are decisions that got made quickly, or by default, or by whoever happened to be standing in the shop that afternoon.

We see the results constantly. A television that is beautiful and unwatchable. A wall that has been opened twice. A room the family quietly stopped using. In most of those cases the work itself was fine, and planning was the part that was skipped.

None of what follows takes expertise to avoid. It takes ten honest minutes thinking about the room you actually have and the way your household actually watches. Read it as a list of questions to answer, not techniques to learn.

Buying the mount before anyone has looked at the wall

The most common mistake in this trade is buying the bracket first. The television arrives, there is a wall of brackets in the shop, one says it fits your size, and it costs less than dinner.

What the box cannot tell you is what your wall is. A television that is straightforward on a standard framed wall is a different job on brick, on block, on a stone fireplace surround, on plaster over lath, on a concrete wall in a tower, or on a wall with services running inside it. The mount that suits one of those is frequently wrong for the others, and that is not something anyone can judge from the outside of the wall.

There is a second version of the same error, which is buying a mount that fits the television but not the room. A fixed flat bracket on a wall that is viewed from an angle, or a long articulating arm in an alcove that will never let it extend, are both technically correct and practically useless.

The fix is unglamorous. Describe the wall before you buy anything, or have someone look at it first.

Mounting it too high

This is the mistake people regret longest, because unlike a wrong bracket it never announces itself. It simply makes the room slightly unpleasant, permanently.

Almost every television we are called back to move is moved down. The instinct to go high comes from reasonable places. The old set sat on a tall stand, the fireplace is on that wall, and the room looks tidier with the screen up out of the furniture. But people watch television sitting down, with their eyes at a fixed height, and a screen above that height means holding your head back for two hours at a time.

Very few people identify the cause. They just watch less, or find the room tiring.

Above a fireplace is where this happens most, and it is worth saying plainly that it is sometimes the right answer and often is not. A mantel, a chimney breast and a firebox all push a screen higher than a comfortable viewing height, and the gap between a room that works and one that does not can be surprisingly small. There are ways to make a high screen tolerable and a good installer will offer them. The better move is to decide height by sitting in the seat you actually use and looking at the wall, before anything is fixed to it.

Ignoring where the light comes from

A room is a different room at three in the afternoon than it is at nine at night, and most people choose their television wall in the evening or from a floor plan.

Two things go wrong. The first is a window opposite the screen, which parks a reflection of the sky in the middle of the picture for half the day. The second, and the one people underestimate, is direct sunlight landing on the panel itself. That washes the image out while it is there and, over years, is genuinely hard on a screen.

The failure is quiet. Nobody says the television is in the wrong place. They say daytime viewing is not great, and pull the blinds every afternoon in a room they chose for its light.

All of it is solvable when it is raised early. A different wall, a different height, a tilt, a matte or anti-glare panel, or a plan for window coverings will each do the job. What does not work is discovering it after the wall is finished, because by then the remaining options are curtains and regret.

Forgetting power, and forgetting the boxes

Nothing undermines a clean wall like a cable running down the middle of it. Power is the most-forgotten item in this entire business, and it gets forgotten because the outlet is usually hidden behind the furniture that is about to be taken away.

A mounted television needs power where it now lives, not where the console used to be. There are proper ways to handle that, and they are decided in advance rather than improvised at the end of the day. It is also the moment a household discovers the wall they wanted has no outlet near it.

The related error is forgetting the devices. Everyone plans for the television. Almost nobody plans for the streaming box, the console, the receiver, the modem, the soundbar and the two things nobody uses but refuses to part with. Those need somewhere to live, they need power, they need ventilation, and several of them need a clear path for a remote signal.

Decide where the equipment is going to sit before the screen goes up. A cabinet, a floating shelf, a closet in the next room and a hidden recess are all valid answers, and each one changes what has to be arranged behind the wall on the day.

Choosing a screen that fights the room

Size is the part everyone worries about and it is rarely the real problem. The mistakes that matter are about the type of screen against the room it has to live in.

A bright room with windows on two sides wants a panel that can fight back, and a screen chosen for perfect black levels in a dark basement will look flat and disappointing in it. A dark basement rewards precisely the opposite choice. A room where people spread out along a wide sectional needs a panel that holds its colour from an angle, and plenty of them do not.

Then there is the screen that is technically right and aesthetically wrong. A large glossy black rectangle in the middle of a carefully decorated room, switched off for twenty hours a day, is a design decision whether or not anybody made it deliberately. Art-mode televisions and low-profile installations exist because of exactly that problem.

None of this needs specialist vocabulary. It needs the screen matched to the light, the seating and the look of the room, in that order.

Saving money on the part that holds everything up

There is a version of this job that costs very little and looks identical on the first day. The steel is thin, the moving parts have play in them, and everything about it is fine until it is not.

The costs turn up later and quietly. A screen that drifts out of level over a year. An arm that sags until the picture tips forward. Fittings that loosen a little with every adjustment. Finishes that mark the wall behind them. And the outcome nobody wants, which is a heavy panel in a house with small children held up by something never intended to do it for a decade.

The mount is also the one part you cannot inspect afterwards. Everything else about a television is visible and replaceable. The hardware is behind the screen and inside the wall, out of sight for as long as it is there, which is exactly why it is the wrong place to economise.

This is not an argument for the most expensive option. It is an argument for choosing the mount to suit the television, the wall and the way you want the screen to move, rather than by price.

Keeping the furniture that no longer belongs

When a television leaves its stand, the stand almost never leaves the room. It stays because it holds the devices, or simply because it has always been there, and the result is a mounted screen floating above a large cabinet that is now doing very little.

It defeats much of the point. Half the appeal of mounting is the floor space and the visual calm you get back, and a redundant console keeps both. It also tempts people into leaving cables draped behind it, which is how a clean installation looks untidy again within a month.

Think about the whole wall rather than just the screen. If equipment genuinely needs a home, choose something that suits the new arrangement or move it to another room. If nothing needs to sit there, let the wall be a wall. Rooms read as larger when the television is not perched on furniture that no longer has a job.

Skipping the walkthrough, and signing off too early

The two most avoidable problems happen at the beginning and the end of the same day.

The walkthrough is the ten minutes before any work starts, when the installer and the household agree on exactly what is going to happen. It is where height gets confirmed by sitting down, where the wall gets checked, where power and devices get sorted, and where anybody who wants to change their mind still can at no cost. Skipping it to save time is the most expensive ten minutes in this trade.

The other end matters just as much. Before anyone packs up and leaves, all of the following should be true.

• Everyone who uses the room has sat in their usual seat and looked at the screen from it.
• Every device has been switched on and shown working through the television, not just plugged in.
• The remotes have been tried by the people who will actually be using them.
• The screen has been checked for level and tilt from where you sit rather than from a ladder.
• Any marks or damage left by the previous setup have been pointed out and discussed.
• You know who to call and what happens if something is not right next week.