TV Mounting, Shelves & Blinds in Clayton, NC

The easy part and the hard part

Clayton has grown faster than almost anywhere in the state, and the developments east and south of town are largely new. For mounting work that is good news: flat drywall, regular framing, square corners, and frequently a builder-installed outlet and low-voltage pass-through already sitting behind the obvious television position.

Where that exists the job is clean. Power and HDMI go through the existing route, nothing gets cut, nothing gets patched, nothing gets repainted.

So the bracket is not the difficulty in these houses. The light is.

Glare, and why it is a design problem

A great many of the newer Clayton great rooms have a double-height bank of windows on one side and the television wall on the other. It is a good-looking room and it is a difficult room for a screen.

Two separate problems:

Direct reflection. If the window is behind you as you sit, its image lands on the screen. Modern matt-finish panels help; they do not solve it. Where the window is two storeys tall the reflection covers a large part of the picture.

Ambient washout. Even without a direct reflection, a very bright room raises the black level of the picture. Everything goes flat and grey through the afternoon and comes back at dusk.

What actually helps, in the order we would try it:

• Move the screen off the obvious centre. Two or three feet laterally often takes it out of the reflection angle entirely, and in an open-plan room it usually costs nothing in terms of where people sit.
• Tilt. A tilting mount aims the screen slightly down, which points its reflection at the floor instead of at the window.
• Shade the top. In a two-storey window wall the upper section is doing most of the damage and it is the part everyone leaves bare because it is out of reach. Covering it changes the room more than covering the lower windows does.
• Accept a compromise position. Occasionally the wall people want simply is the wrong wall, and we would rather say so before drilling than after.

Blinds, at the scale new houses need them

Production builds almost never include window coverings, so the typical Clayton call is not one blind. It is a house.

That is a measuring job before it is an installation job, and the measuring is where it goes right or wrong:

Every opening gets measured at three points — top, middle and bottom for width, and both sides for drop. New frames are better than old ones but they are not perfect, and a blind ordered to the widest measurement will bind.

Inside or outside mount gets decided per window. Inside looks cleaner and needs enough frame depth to take the headrail. Outside covers a window that is out of square and blocks more light at the edges. It is a per-window decision, not a whole-house one.

The order schedule comes from the measurements. We will give you a list you can order from with the mount type and the finished size per window. Then everything gets fitted in one visit when the delivery lands.

Doing it in the other order — buying first because there is a sale on — is how people end up with a stack of blinds that are an inch too wide for the openings they were bought for.

The two-storey windows need proper access equipment rather than a ladder. That gets priced in rather than improvised.

Shelving and the rest

Floating shelves, heavy mirrors, gallery walls and garage storage all go into framing. In houses this age that is straightforward — regular stud spacing and no surprises behind the board.

Gallery walls get laid out on the floor and transferred with a paper template so the composition is settled before anything is drilled.

Downtown Clayton

The older streets near the town centre are a different job. Smaller rooms, older windows in non-standard sizes, and walls that may not be drywall. None of the assumptions above apply, and we treat those houses the way we treat any older property — find out what the wall is before committing to a method.

Getting a price

Send a photo of the wall, the screen size, and which way the room faces or where the windows are. For blinds, a photo of each window with a tape across the opening, or just tell us how many windows there are and we will measure on site.

Clayton is about forty minutes from us. There is no travel charge, but at that distance a single mount is not good value on its own — send the whole list and we will book one visit for it.