Why we decided to mount our TV above the fireplace!!

Why we decided to mount our TV above the fireplace!!

• 1.22.2021

We've lived in this house 2.5 years now and we've tried several different locations for the TV. You can see the different layouts we've tried for our living room here. It's a long, skinny room with the fireplace on the long wall, and we know we're not the only ones who've struggled with this--when we first walked through the house the previous owners had the TV in front of a window, creating two living areas! 

A TV over the fireplace is a common, but not ideal situation in a lot of homes. In fact, it's a home design "don't" for a lot of people. We fought it for a long time because we didn't want to be staring up at it at a steep angle, but... I'll share why we finally mounted our (big, old) TV, and why we're so happy with it!

Our living room is long and narrow, with a the fireplace and two windows on the long wall. There's a huge picture window on the front wall opposite our wall of bookcases. 

Pros and cons of the TV above the fireplace

The biggest reason to mount a TV above the fireplace is it creates one, strong focal point. We tried putting our TV on the wall where the bookcases are now, on top of a nice dresser, and it just felt messy. College student-ey. Plus, then it was really, really far away from the couch, which we had with its back to the picture window. Even though it's a big black plastic thing, it's often more elegant to enhance the existing focal point of a fireplace or wall where all the focus already goes than to split it to two locations.

We had the couch in that spot by the front for a long, long time (see old pics here, and a good example below) and we did like having a large area of the living room open... but it was almost to large, and the coffee table didn't serve the white chairs. And we didn't have enough seating.

From this living room update

So we rotated the couch and sort of closed off the living room space with it, but it made the coffee table placement much more natural.

But then we'd have been turning our heads sideways with the TV on the (now) bookcase wall, so we actually took the TV out of here for a while and used a small one that we just pulled down onto the coffee table and set up when we wanted to watch TV!!!! Ha! It was not ideal. So we bought this TV mount on Black Friday and finally mounted the big one!

Rule of thumb: you can put a TV over a fireplace if the couch is far enough away and your mantel is low enough that your viewing angle is comfortable.

Our couch is not far enough away. But it's still the lesser of a couple evils for us.

I should note that we don't use our fireplace for fires right now; it sounds like it/our chimney need some repairs we're not prepared to do. So heat is not an issue here.

Second rule of thumb: big TVs can be fine even in the main living area, but if you put it above a fireplace, the TV must be narrower than the mantel. Helps it feel more like art and more like you meant to do that.

Since moving the TV up we've felt so good about this layout! It's obviously much easier than pulling out a small TV when we want to watch, but it helps the room feel more traditional, actually, to really focus attention on its biggest architectural feature (that fireplace). 

It would be great if we had a Frame TV or really flat modern flat screen (this big one is from 2009!) but it's not in the budget now, and it doesn't bother us too much. Maybe someday a sleek Frame TV that looks like art. For now, enjoying this!