Here is the picture saga of my new home theater arrangement in my new house.. It all started with the realization that all of the bonus points I've earned at work for various projects could be used soley for a new TV. Not just a TV, but mounting the T.V., having it calibrated, and a 4 year premium warranty. My total costs for this out of pocket was $275, not bad! "How?!" you ask?
It starts with these:
102, $20 best buy gift cards. That's $2040 dollars of awesome. I was able to discover that the registers at customer service can only process 100 gift cards at a time. The receipt was a little booklet. They had to run the last 2 gift cards as if it was cash. I had pooled them into one whopping gift card.
Best Buy came a week later to do the install. They ran the 20 foot HDMI cable I got from monoprice down my fireplace mantel through the floor and back up through the wall to make a small outlet with my coax and HDMI coming out to what will eventually be my A/V stand. When they went to mount the tv there was a terrible discovery. No studs. Not a freaking stud was in the wall, nor cinder block to drill into. They shrugged and said, "Sorry."
T.V. must go on the wall because there is no other place to logically put a 50" screen in the room without really f*cking up my chi. Enter Ronnie, the handy man. For an additional $250 he was going to save my marriage.
This was what I had to work with. Ronnie is the man though, and he set me up straight.
Now I don't have to worry about a power cable draping down the wall. He wasn't able to feed the hdmi cable because it was too thick and bulky.
Then came mud over 3 days, priming, and paint at 2:30am friday morning as Best Buy was coming between 12pm-4pm to finish hanging the T.V.
Finally Best Buy came and anchored the T.V. and hung it... Oh it was a great success. I immediately went into home theater set up mode and began populating the mantel.
And finally, we set up the ambiance for our night time home theater movie experience.
EDIT: The speaker wire/PSEye wires will eventually be tucked and tied after I get my A/V component stand and I run the final speaker wires, etc... So apologies to the purests out there who hate seeing wires and caught them in the corner.