Chelsea loves the library/office. She is turning it into her own little sanctuary. If it had unlimited food and a bed, she might not ever leave. To that end, she recently requested a television so that she can watch Real Housewives of Who Knows Where.
We went with the Samsung the Frame TV and a Deco TV Frames again. The space above her desk allowed for the 43-inch model along with a burlwood frame.
I’ve mentioned in other posts that the headache with hanging anything heavy in our house is dealing with plaster and lathe walls. Due to the brittleness of the plaster along with the flexibility of the lathe, there is real potential for unexpected damage to the walls and for whatever is being hung to crash to the floor.
Surprisingly, both of the mounting brackets went into studs on the first try. A win for me.
One of the selling points of The Frame TVs is that they have a separate input box that can be tucked away out of view. A related selling point is that the box and TV use a thin One Connect cable to feed power and video sources to the screen. The idea is that the cable is so lightweight it will blend into the wall and not be noticed. Yep, that’s the idea.
Maybe under just the right circumstances that might be the case. It didn’t work for us. I even tried painting it the same color as the wall in hopes that it might be less noticable.
Nope.
As the picture above demonstrates, the cable catches the light from the windows and casts a very obtrusive shadow on the wall.
I didn’t want to push my luck, but my emotional well-being was now at stake. It was time to cut holes in the wall.
After measuring twenty times and starting to cut once I found this:
That is one layer of removed sheetrock revealing wallpaper underneath.
Wait! What? Sheetrock? Until now, the other walls I have mounted things to have been the expected plaster and lathe.
Continuing to cut (and nervously sweat), I found no lathe at all. Instead there was what appeared to be a sandwich of sheetrock on the base, plaster in the middle, wallpaper attached to that, and finally, sheetrock on top.
I have no idea why this would be the case. It would seem to indicate that someone removed that section of the wall at some point and rebuilt it. If that were the case why use plaster at all?
One of our neighbors, who has an incredible amount of experience restoring these old houses could only guess that they did that to make the wall the same thickness as the corresponding wall on the other side of the fireplace.
But why need to rebuild it at all?
I have a guess. It actually just came to me at this moment. As I am typing this, I am sitting on the sofa in the living room. Our living room shares the wall with the library. Out of my peripheral vision I can see the solarium. It was not original to the house and was added sometime later. What is the back wall of the solarium connects to the house next to the wall between the living room and library. I wonder if the builders had to remove the plaster and lathe to tie into the studs and joists. If my hypothesis is correct, there is a good chance the wall between the solarium and living room is also sheetrock covered in plaster.
I have no intention of finding out, but if I need to mount something heavy on that wall I’ll feel more confident about the possibility.