Rearranging my Living room: Relocating the TV

Feb 16 2025
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Its really funny to me how things snowball around here. It all started with the post I wrote about how our living room is our most difficult to arrange room and how it has evolved over the last ten years. It included my proclamation that there was only ONE wall where the television could ever go… Well, not two days later, I was standing in the living room with a tape measure and Lodi looking at me with an: OH NO expression.

I get excited about things lol so I had already taken down the shelf and quilt from the wall I wanted our TV to move to, took out the mantel from under our old TV and moved our entertainment center, corner cabinet and blanket ladder when I took these pictures.

(Oh, also, don’t mind the Xmas tree and decorations, I did most of this over my holiday break.)

So you can see the room was a bit awkward and ugly for awhile and these are the brutally honest photos I took with my crappy cell phone. This was also over the darkest days for us here in Minnesota so I had little to no natural light as well!

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

My first impression was the rug absolutely needs to go.

Lodi purchased the rug for our old dog needing as much carpet as possible to help her get around… sadly we lost her late last year and I felt like the rug was way bigger than this room needed.

So this is where things snowballed on me:

Eventually I feel like the rug will be cool for the guest bedroom that I’ve been wanting to turn into a den for Lodi. (We rarely have guests and he’s using that room almost daily and the rug is big enough to practically carpet the whole room!)

So, we’ll be purging the desk, chair, bench, end table, area rug and bed out of there and then Lodi’s new den will be just a room with a big rug in it which will actually be perfect…

Because then, with our guest sleeping gone, we’ll want to put a bed in the basement. But to do that we will have to relocate one of his sofas… and it just so happens that Lodi’s den will fit the biggest sofa perfectly.

Somehow that all brought us back to the living room…

Because, coincidentally, that also means the rug in the basement will need a new home and it just so happens to be about perfect for right here.

Everybody still with me?

First thing was first though I had to add an outlet to the wall where I wanted to relocate the TV.

I would never have believed how often I go back and look at my renovation photos to remind myself where electrical lines and plumbing pipes are… But its been a lot! I dug up my old renovation files and found a picture of that wall in the living room right after I had finished the electrical and plumbing.

It showed me exactly where the electrical line was to the outlet in the bathroom.

PERFECT

Minnesota electrical code says that every bathroom has to be on its own 20amp AFCI/GFCI breaker even if it is only ONE outlet that we never use… SCREW THAT UTTER NONSENSE.

I cut my little rectangle in the drywall, reached in and grabbed the line. I got lucky that there was enough slack that I didn’t need to add a junction I only had to add my one box and my one outlet.

I did a little dance, that job had no business being so quick and easy!

Think of that: Just ONE outlet for our entire living room entertainment space.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

How things have changed!

All I had to plug in was our TV and our Amazon Firestick and we don’t even need the firestick we just like it better than the TV interface.

Nowadays we don’t even need an entertainment center anymore!

I was thinking of all the stuff we used to have hooked up to our TV when I was a kid. VHS player, DVD player, Nintendo, PlayStation, DVR, DirectTV Receiver and I’m pretty sure we had the modem in there too because why not?

It also held all of our VHS tapes, DVDs and games and controllers for all of our consoles… I’m also pretty sure we had a big stereo setup thrown into the mix as well and, no doubt, we had at least five different remotes for everything…

When I renovated I even ran Coax and telephone line because streaming was still a really new concept and that was only ten years ago!

After I moved in though I never bothered getting DirectTV as I’m not a big TV watcher anyway and I really couldn’t afford it. I also didn’t bother getting a telephone line installed either and that’s why there are two outlets plus two boxes on the wall where our tv used to be.

One holds coax, the other holds telephone line.

I wish I had known I wasn’t going to use them! I spent a lot of time and money running them both throughout this house.

I had my cell phone, my computer and my Nintendo Wii got Netflix even back then so I didn’t need anything else.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

The biggest purchase I made for our “new” living room rearrangement was a new TV mount. It was less than $30 and gives us full motion pull out, tilt and turn and its pretty sweet!

I ended up with a lot of patching and painting to do on both walls so the room was rather a disaster for a little while… Our old TV was a monstrosity so I had simply painted around it years ago and the old TV mount also left some impressive holes in the wall.

(Kind of a funny story. Lodi asked if we could consider replacing the TV and I surprised him by instantly agreeing. I am VERY frugal (I don’t replace anything if I can make it work) but that 15yo flat screen weighed an absolute TON, most of its inputs didn’t even work and then it took the choice out of our hands by dying on its own not long after our conversation! We got a 55″ replacement that was a bit smaller but I think its plenty big for this room.)

This space was also desperate for a full cleaning. From dog hair to pet dander and just dust and dirt collecting it felt really good to get this room sparkling again.

And our hardwood floor gave a big THANK YOU for the mopping and oiling!

I struggled with this room for years because it is longer than it is wide but the extra length wasn’t enough to do anything with it. Our sofa miraculously tucked in and fit like a glove between the stairwell and the chimney with our little sofa table charging station behind it and we finally found a way to utilize that extra space.

We now have a “hall” to our second floor and a living room that no longer feels long or narrow!

You can see we still have a long ways to go deciding on how we want to redecorate the space and the “too big” rug is still here because the rearrangement actually made it a lot less obnoxious.

In fact, I’m going to see what the space feels like if I push the rug all the way to the French doors so it will “carpet” the hallway behind the sofa.

One thing we know for sure: THIS WAS A WIN AND WE WON’T BE GOING BACK!

It is absolutely astonishing how much better this room feels!

I don’t know if I’m going to be putting up the shelf and quilt wall hanging I had in here before. My great grandma made that quilt and I loved having it on display but it may be time to tuck it away somewhere safe for now.

I do want to bring the shelf back though and right now I’m thinking it might look nice above the stained glass window…

The two old windows I made into “mirrors” bring a huge amount of light into this dark room so I am VERY hesitant to take them out but it might be time for something different…

One of them could go above where our “entertainment” center ended up and the other would make a nice reflection of light in our stairwell maybe…

The snowball effect around here is never ending apparently lol!

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

I wrote about how our living room, being our most difficult to arrange room, has evolved over the last ten years.

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