Hung

You know it's going to be a great day when you start it off with one of these babies:


Mmmmmm. Eating healthy gets boring after awhile and I highly suggest letting loose on occasion. So worth it.

So yesterday we made the 75 mile trip down to Ikea for a little Swedish fabulosity. OMG. Ikea is such a mecca for home furnishings, if you are willing to fight the ridiculous crowd a bit. We had one mission with this trip and that was to buy a new bookshelf to place under the new TV that Nate was insistent on hanging from the wall. We found an awesome shelf made of all wood (kind of hard to find at Ikea) for only $200. We also picked up some random drinking glassess and two flour/sugar containers. Odd, no?

This was the scene of the crime today. Nate took it upon himself to not only construct the entire shelf on his own (with the aid of Swedish instructions) but also to hang the TV. I was promised I could stay out of it and yet somehow I got roped into helping a smidge. Oh well. It 'twas worth it.


Please note the before (well, the updated 'before.' The real before would have been with our tiny tube TV....which now has a proud new owner via Craigslist! I tell you Ikea and Craigslist are my two favorite things right now.)


And......the after. Ta Da!

So I had to pull the lamps from our bedroom to make it work but all in all, I love it. Nate is going to get us one of those nifty cable hider things, too and I'm trying to convince him to get rid of one of the DVD players on top but something about needing them both for surround sound? I dunno, it's a guy thing I guess.

We found an amazingly cheap wall mount on Amazon (oh wait, Craigslist, Ikea, and Amazon are my faves actually) for $25. Best Buy can eat their $250 mount. Seriously. This thing ain't going nowhere. And really it wasn't too bad to hang once Nate found the studs in the wall. He promises it's sturdy enough to do pull ups on but I think I'll just take his word for it. I like how it has 15 degrees of tilt, too. And since the TV is plasma it doesn't get that dark tint from certain angles like LCDs do. At least, that is what Nate tells me...I couldn't tell a difference between plasma and LCD if you paid me.


Had to rearrange the side table decor a bit on this wall, the one that faces the TV. We moved our table lamps from this spot into our bedroom and are only using one of our floor lamps now. Hope it's enough light! Henry loves it all, obvi.


And yes. I read a lot of books. Actually, I used to think I was rich so I bought all of the books I was reading instead of borrowing them from the library like I do now. You'll also find our cookbooks, DVDs, a few of my scrapbooks, and even some school text books down there. Something about a bunch of books lined up makes me very happy.


So that is that. We are officially in the 21st century and managed to hang the TV without professional help. All in all, the shelf assembly plus the wall mount only took a few hours today. I'm so proud of Nate for being Mr. Handyman! And I will admit: the new TV is pretty fabulous. Too bad it's always set to the golf channel these days:)