In June of 2025 we started a remodel of our living room, finished everything but lacking the new sofa to fit the space in July of 2025, and got that missing piece in January of 2026. Here are a couple before and after photos:
The fireplace mantle was moved down and 2 columns added to allow a TV placement above the fireplace that wasn’t too tall. The TV itself required wiring and a cable channel ran to setup allow devices like a nintendo switch to plug in on the old-TV wall. Some drywall patching, paint, and it was all good to go!
The sofa arrived about a month after ordering it, and the corner is a “wedge corner” meaning it has a 45 degree front and someone can actually sit there. It’s super comfy and now we can enjoy the living room with lots of space!
Moving the Mantle
The mantle has a bracket inside which was lag toggle bolted into the wall. Using a reciprocating saw, I was able to cut them from the top between the mantle and the wall.
The bracket was gorilla-glued to the mantle, so had to use some acetone and shims to separate the two pieces for proper re-hanging.
Re-hanging it lower was easy enough with some brick anchor bolts.
Lastly, we built some columns with the radial arm saw and table saw. A bit of paint, attaching to the wall, and caulk and they turned out great!
TV Wiring
The Samsung Frame TV uses a “one-connect box”, which sounds neat at first because all your inputs and devices plug into this box, and then one thin wire carries both power and data to the TV. However, we were planning to have just a tiny table beside the sofa with a game console, so having all of this wiring over there would be a lot – plus we would need a longer one-connect cable that carries the power and data and these are special and expensive. We decided to do what others have done, and put the one-connect in an enclosure behind the TV and then just extend HDMI via network cables to where we need it.
The black brackets are for mounting the TV, and inside the enclosure is a plug (left middle, with surge protector built-in), a 1.5″ cable channel (let bottom, behind plugs) with 3x network cables (2 for hdmi extension, 1 for network), the one-connect on the whole right side (black box), the HDMI extenders (middle slightly left, small black box), the power brick for the sound bar (bottom right, white box), and later re-organized the cables to clean it up and add a Roku box.
On the wall where the old TV was, and the new sofa and table will go, there is just a plug and 4 network ports. The top two are networking, the bottom 2 are extenders for HDMI. It’s easier to run network cable longer distances in walls, than to pull a thick HDMI cable.
The sound bar floats under the TV without wires showing, so those 2 holes below were carefully measured and there is small cable tubing there as well to run the power to one side, and the mini HDMI cable up to the one-connect on the other side.
The rest was just lots of drywall hole patching, painting, caulking and cleaning. Wheew!