Response To Light

We’ve been in the house almost a year and yet there are still a ton a things to do. One project opens the door to three more. It feels like it’s never going to end some days. That said, there are a couple of things I want to finish. The family room looks great but the bar is still an eye sore. Our roof desperately needs to get done. I won’t even speak about the carpets.

The one area I spend the most time in is the bedroom. It’s nice and we’ve done a decent job decorating but you don’t walk into it thinking you’ve arrived at your retreat. I mostly see how unfinished it is. Where is the artwork, the little touches that make you say, “Wow!” Last weekend was a big step forward with mounting the television. That whole area went from being a cluttered mess to a clean canvas. We’ve been using $10 lamps that I bought at IKEA. They were never meant to “live” that long. I just wanted something finish off the room when we first got our bedroom furniture. In addtition to mounting the plasma, I also purchased real lamps for the bedroom side tables with shades to match. There was another improvement that helped to finish the room.

This weekend I wanted to find some artwork to hang and to change the hardware on the dressers. I saw some interesting pieces in Costco of all places. I can’t say that Lynne was overly impressed but I give her credit to supporting my “vision”. We also decided to change the hardware on our dressers.

Before

We purchased this furniture when we bought the house. It’s inexpensive but has nice lines and fits the decor of the house. I was never thrilled at the handles but I didn’t realize how bad they were until I unscrewed one to check the size. They are nothing but painted MDF. Yuck! If we are trying to make the bedroom feel like an upscale hotel room, MDF handles will not do the trick. At least not the L shaped pieces of crap they were using.

Normally this is an easy fix. Take off the old hardware. Find some that you like. Put those on and you have brand new dressers. On our drawers the screws holes were not the standard 3″. They were 3 1/4″. This limited what I could get since I would have to drill new holes and the hardware would need to cover them up.

This probably would not have been my first choice had I not had the limitation of covering the previous holes. But they are certainly better than what we had on before.

So how do we mount them? I decided to reuse the hole on the left hand side. That meant I needed to drill a hole 1/4″ inside from the right hand hole. I could have measured the distance or just guess but I wanted a certain level of predictability. I therefore created a simple jig to make sure the holes were always correct.

Hardware Mounting Jig

I sit the jig on top of the drawer and screw in a screw from the back side of the drawer into the jig. I then clamp down the jig to the drawer. I already had a drill hole three inches away from the right side which I used as my template. The other annoying thing was the screws that came with the new hardware were not long enough. This meant I had to drill a countersink hole to enable the screw to attach to the handles.

End Result

As always when photographing anything very dark the picture doesn’t fully convey what you see in person. The new handles dress up the drawers and adds an element that fits in with the rest of the room. It is subtle to be sure but it is more in line with what we are trying to do.

If you want to improve the look of your cabinets, desks or drawers this is a simple tip to do just that. The total cost of the new hardware was $100 (Canadian).

Last year we purchased a Plasma TV. It’s been sitting on the dresser in the bedroom since then. Why not mount before then? TV mounts at Futureshop and Best Buy start at $200. That’s too much. Ebay. Too cheap. Costco had them but the models they had would only let you fasten them to one stud. I can see coming home and seeing the TV on the floor. After six months of looking, I gave up. This past weekend found me in Costco’s once again. This time they had a new model and lo and behold — I could attach it to two studs! And it was at the very reasonable price of $100.

Mounting to the TV

Putting the bracket on the television was fairly simple. Take out four screws. Replace them with four screws that came in the kit and attach the brackets.

Attaching the TV Mount to wall

This part was mildly tricky. I located the studs with my stud locator (insert joke here…) and marked off the edges. I then created a story stick to help figure out how high I wanted the tv to be. Normally you would want the television at eye level from where you are watching it. This wasn’t going to work in this case as Lynne wanted space to place things on her dresser. I also wanted a shelf for the dvd player and cable box.

With everything measured and marked I drilled one hole and mounted the wall bracket. If there is one thing that needs to be dead on is making sure the TV mount is level. I have to admit I was slightly off (less than an eighth of an inch). This made a huge difference when I mounted the television. So I had to take out all of the screws, relevel, and try again. It turned out much better the second time.

The other item that had me a little nervous was the coaxial cable for the cable box. I needed to route it from one side of the room to the other. Initially I was thinking I was going to need to drill through the studs to pull through the cable. This turned out not to be necessary. There is a crawl space to the wall I needed access to and I could visibly see where the cables needed to go. That was a huge time saver!

End Result

Here is the end result. I create a hole right under the TV bracket mount and then another at the bottom of the wall. No visible wires.

When I was done, I was a little disappointed as it seemed that the TV was too high. A half day later and my eyes adjusted.

The whole project took most of the weekend but I think it has been time well spent.