TV Mounting, Shelves & Blinds in Garner, NC

Ranch geometry

Garner has a large stock of 1960s to 1980s ranches and split-levels, and their living rooms have a shape that changes this job.

They are long. Often close to twice as long as they are deep, with the seating arranged along the length rather than square to one wall. The sofa faces the screen; the armchairs at either end sit thirty or forty degrees off it.

That has two consequences.

The geometry gets uncomfortable. Past about thirty degrees off centre you are watching a picture that is visibly narrowed, and in a long room some seats are always going to be there.

Panel type starts to matter. Some screen technologies hold their contrast and colour a long way off-axis and some wash out noticeably. That is a question about the television rather than the mount, but it is worth knowing before you buy if the room is shaped like this.

The practical answer is usually an articulating mount rather than a fixed plate. Not as an upsell — in a room this shape, being able to aim the screen at whoever is actually watching is the difference between a good picture and a compromise nobody is happy with. On a fixed plate in a long ranch room, somebody always gets the bad seat.

The brick fireplace wall

A great many Garner ranches have a brick fireplace occupying most of one wall, sometimes floor to ceiling. It is usually the wall people want the television on, and it is a completely different job from mounting on drywall.

Anchoring. Fixings go into the brick itself, not into the mortar joints. Mortar is the weak part of the assembly and an anchor set into it will loosen under a heavy full-motion mount over time. Drilling brick is slower and it is what makes the mount permanent.

Cable. Nothing can be fished behind solid masonry. That is physics rather than difficulty. The three honest options are a slim painted channel, a recessed box set into the brick below the mantel with the run dropping to it, or building the whole face out as a framed feature wall with everything inside the new cavity. We will tell you what each involves rather than promising invisible cables on a wall that cannot have them.

Height. This is where the eight-foot ceiling bites. Clear the mantel and there is very little room left before the screen centre is well above comfortable eye level. A tilting mount recovers some of it. If the numbers genuinely do not work, the fireplace is the wrong wall, and we would rather say that at the quote than after the holes are drilled.

Walls that are not what they look like

Older Garner houses hold a couple of surprises worth checking before drilling.

Sheet panelling. Plenty of these homes still have original dark wood panelling on at least one wall. Sometimes it is over finished drywall; sometimes it went straight onto studs. What is behind it changes the fixing entirely, and it is worth finding out at the edge of a wall rather than in the middle.

Masonry exterior walls with furring. Where a wall is brick or block on the outside, the interior surface may be board on thin furring strips rather than on full studs. A furring strip will not hold a television. The fixing has to reach something structural behind it.

Popcorn ceilings. Not a mounting issue directly, but worth mentioning if you are having a ceiling fan or a projector mount fitted at the same time, because it changes how the fitting sits and how the surface gets made good.

The newer south side

South and east of the old town, along the corridors out toward Cleveland and Clayton, the housing is recent. Those calls are the opposite: flat drywall, regular framing, sometimes structured wiring already run. Straightforward, and the volume item there is blinds, because production builds do not include them.

The other half of this service

Blinds. Older Garner windows, particularly the aluminium-framed ones from the 1970s, are frequently non-standard sizes and out of square. We measure at three points and decide inside versus outside mount per window.

Floating shelves and heavy mirrors. Into framing without exception. A floating shelf is a long lever arm and hollow-wall anchors give up under load, usually about a fortnight after it gets filled.

Gallery walls. Laid out on the floor and transferred with a paper template, so the composition is settled before any holes exist.

Getting a price

Send a photo of the wall, the screen size, and — the important one in Garner — tell us whether it is drywall, panelling or brick. Add a photo taken from where you actually sit, because in a long room that tells us as much as the wall shot does.

Garner is about half an hour from us, in the same bracket as most of our list.