TV Mounting, Shelves & Blinds in Wake Forest, NC

The full-height fireplace problem

Wake Forest kept a historic core and had twenty years of subdivision building wrapped around it, and mounting work runs into a different obstacle in each half.

Start with the newer half, because it produces the same call over and over.

Heritage, Wakefield and the developments of that generation frequently have a two-storey great room with a stone or brick chimney breast running the full height of it. Often there is a raised hearth. The mantel sits above the hearth, and by the time you clear the mantel the screen centre is a long way above where anyone is sitting.

Two numbers decide whether it works:

How high is the mantel. Measure from the floor to the top of it.

How far away is the sofa. Measure from the seat back to the fireplace face.

From those you can work out the viewing angle. Comfortable is roughly eye level. Tolerable is up to about fifteen degrees above it. Past that, an hour of watching is an hour of holding your head back, and people stop using the room.

We do this arithmetic before agreeing to the position, because it is much easier than explaining it afterwards.

When the numbers do not work

Three honest options, in order of cost:

Move the screen off the fireplace. Sometimes there is a perfectly good wall nobody considered because the fireplace is the obvious focal point. Worth a look before spending money on hardware.

A tilting mount. Aims the picture down at the seating, which recovers a surprising amount of a bad angle and costs very little.

A pull-down mount. Brings the screen down and forward to eye level for watching, then returns it flat to the wall. It costs meaningfully more than a fixed plate. In a room where the fireplace genuinely is the only wall, it is the difference between a room you use and a room you look up at, and we would rather recommend it than fit something you regret.

Fixing into stone

Stone is not brick. It is irregular, the pieces vary in depth, and the mortar between them is the weak part of the assembly.

Fixings go into the stone itself where the material is substantial enough to take them, never into the joints. That sometimes means the reliable points are not exactly where the bracket would prefer, so a plate gets offset slightly or a spacer arrangement bridges to solid material. It is slower than drywall by a wide margin and it is what makes the mount permanent.

Nothing can be fished behind solid masonry, so the cable either runs in a slim painted channel, drops to a recessed box below the mantel, or the whole face gets built out as a framed feature wall with the wiring inside.

Historic downtown

Around the old centre the housing is a different age entirely, and the mounting issues are the ones any older house has: walls that may be plaster over lath, no socket where the screen wants to be, and rooms where every wall is already doing something.

The rule for plaster is absolute — fixings reach the studs. Plaster holds because it keyed through the lath, and an anchor in the plaster field loads a brittle shell that will crack and let go.

The blind job downtown is different too

This is the part that catches people out in the older Wake Forest houses.

The windows are frequently tall and narrow, and many are topped with a transom — a smaller fixed pane above the main sash. That gives you a decision to make before ordering:

Treat the main sash only. The transom stays bare, which keeps the daylight and the architectural character. Inside mount, measured to the sash opening.

Cover the whole opening. Usually an outside mount sized to the full height including the transom, which blocks more light and reads as a single window.

Both are legitimate. The expensive mistake is measuring for one and ordering the other, which is easy to do because the two measurements are taken from different reference points.

Older frames are also rarely square, so every opening gets measured at three points and worked to the tightest.

The rest of the service

Floating shelves and heavy mirrors into framing without exception, in either half of town.

Gallery walls laid out on the floor and transferred with a paper template. In an old house that also means fewer holes in plaster, which matters.

Curtain rods find framing or use the window frame where it is solid. In older houses there is frequently no header above the window where the bracket would like to go.

Distance

Wake Forest is about three quarters of an hour from us, the outer edge of our area. No travel charge, but a single small job at that distance is not good value for you. Send the whole list and we will book one visit for it.

Getting a price

Send a photo of the wall, the screen size, the mantel height and the distance from the sofa. For blinds, a photo of a typical window with a tape across it, and tell us whether there are transoms.