Today I learned:

• I’m still an impulsive buyer.

What a day… I decided to go to Circuit City to buy a new house phone, and came back with a 40" 1080p LCD television. Talk about impulse buy!

They wanted $400.00 to install it, but even then, they wouldn’t install any electrical outlets, so I decided to brave it and do it myself. Well to be fair I did invite a friend over to help since he’s a bit more handy than I. We’ll just call him “Handy Manny”.

• How to install a wall mounted flat panel television.

Before Manny came over, I was successful in fishing the coax to the new location. He showed me a thing or two about safely daisy chaining my existing outlet to a new location behind where the television would be mounted. We then installed several new wall outlets to be used for component cabling from the tv into the wall, and back out the bottom. All this went pretty smoothly, though once things started getting tight we could no longer fish the wires easily, so I just went into the adjacent room (luckily it’s our unfinished garage), and carved a chunk out of the drywall so I could feed the wires cleanly.

• Universal flat panel TV mounting brackets are for the birds.

Lastly we bolted the mounting unit to the wall and attached the brackets to the television. It’s a universal kit (Verge VFXLGMT) that Circuit City provides for this model, to support 40" to 60" televisions. The problem is, my TV is on the low end of this scale, so the brackets stick out like a sore thumb. So next time I do this I will make sure the mounting kit I buy is well short of the television height.

Next project? Hacksaw the ends off those suckers!

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