TV Wall Mount Mistakes Often Made By DIY'ers

TV wall mount installations are something that we do every day here at Gulfcoast Installations. Unfortunately, though, many times our installation jobs are the result of someone trying to wall mount their own TV only to have it go terribly wrong and then we get called in to fix the mess! This winds up costing homeowners more money than if they had just called a professional to do the installation in the first place! But what are some of the DIY mounting fixes that we’ve had to do over the years? Here are a few of the most common mistakes that DIY’ers make…

TV Wall Mount Mistakes Often Made By DIY’ers

Not Reading the Instruction Book!

Both your TV and your TV wall mount come with instructions and if you aren’t quite sure what you are doing during your own installation, make sure to read those instruction manuals twice over! Wall mounting your TV isn’t just as simple as affixing your TV to a bracket and affixing that bracket to the wall! There are actually quite a few things that can go awry and result in disaster. For example, you may ruin your TV by attempting to attach it to a TV mount incorrectly!

Improvising With Tools

If the TV wall mount suggests that you use a specific tool to complete your TV installation, make sure that you use that tool and nothing else! Yes, even if it means stopping a project halfway through to go out and buy a tool that you don’t have! There is a reason that instructions call for specific tools and failing to use those tools can result in disaster once again. For example, using the wrong tool can split the anchor for your TV wall mount and cause it to be insecurely fixed to the wall. Unfortunately, this means that at any time in the future your TV could drop from the wall and injure someone while also breaking your TV.

For a perfect installation every time, give the pro team here at Gulf Coast Installations a Call!

Substituting Missing Parts

Sometimes items that we purchase at the store come with pieces missing and we don’t realize that they’re missing until we get back home. By this point, the box is already ripped open, you already have your tools out, and you really don’t feel like packing everything back up and going back to the store…so, you improvise. After all, what difference could one substituted screw make? Well, the answer is quite a lot!

Your television mount comes with specific sized screws that are designed to hold the weight of your television and to firmly hold your TV mount to the wall. Substituting just one of those screws with a smaller lighter weight screw compromises how firmly that TV mount holds to the wall. What happens next? That TV becomes lose over time and may even come crashing down at any point if the mount becomes too loose!

Not Planning Before You Begin

When you wall mount anything, you need to plan ahead of time. You plan not only to be sure that you have the right equipment to do the install correctly, but you plan so that you can be sure that everything will go smoothly. For example, you plan which wall you will mount the TV on. This means that you need to know how far apart the studs are on that wall, you need to know whether that wall is a load-bearing wall, you need to know what lies behind that wall. You need to know all of this so that you can know what to expect when you start pulling out the tools! The very last thing you want to do is go to affix your TV mounting bracket to the wall and hit an electrical wire as you are screwing the mount to the wall! Know EXACTLY where you are going to be installing that mount and know exactly what’s behind the wall that you are going to be working on!