Can a television hang over the fireplace?
Sometimes, and a good deal less often than the photographs suggest. Three things settle it: the heat coming up off the firebox, whether the chimney breast is masonry that has to be cored to get a mount and a cable through it, and where the screen’s center lands once it clears the mantel. In plenty of Owensboro living rooms at least two of the three say no.
Height is the part people feel and cannot name. Sit on your own couch and look straight ahead. Where your eyes point is where the middle of a screen belongs. Add a mantel, then a screen above it, and the middle of the picture has climbed well past that line. You watch the ballgame with your chin up, which is comfortable for about ten minutes.
The cases where it works are real. A direct-vent gas firebox set low in a newer house off Highway 54, a nine-foot ceiling, seating pushed back rather than pulled in, and a mantel shelf with enough projection to throw rising heat into the room instead of up the face of the wall. Whether it is a safe install comes down to two specs, neither of them the cabinet shop’s: the firebox manufacturer’s clearance-to-combustibles instructions for the unit on your hearth, and the television maker’s ambient temperature limits. Find the model plate inside the firebox door. A cabinetmaker who quotes a clearance from memory is guessing.
How much weight does a media wall have to hold?
More than the screen weighs, because the load hangs off a vertical surface with a long lever on it. A screen on a fixed low-profile plate is manageable. On a full-motion arm, swung out and turned toward the kitchen, it multiplies what the fasteners feel. The wall has to be ready before a finished panel goes up, because nobody opens a sprayed piece of custom built-in cabinetry later to add backing.
It goes one of two ways. The mount lands on framing or on solid blocking let into the wall, decided while the wall is open or the cabinetmaker has the back off. Or it lands on the cabinetry, and the shop builds a backer panel into the case at that height, glued and screwed to the carcass, and tells you where it is. A face frame is not a mount point. Drywall anchors behind a built-in are how a screen ends up on the hearth.
Shelves are the quieter version of the same problem. Span decides them: the longer a shelf runs without support behind it, the thicker it has to be. A shelf built for a row of hardbacks is a different part from one holding three framed photographs and a plant, and the difference shows up as thickness, a stiffening hardwood edge, or a partition breaking a long run. Tell the shop what really goes on them. The cabinet wood guide covers how each species behaves through an Ohio Valley summer.
Where do the wires and the equipment go?
Behind a removable panel, into a vented bay, and out of sight. The great rooms in the newer houses toward Thruston and Masonville almost all arrive the same way: one cable jack sitting alone in the middle of a big blank wall with a dust cap on it, one outlet down at the baseboard, and nothing else. Everything else routes from those two points, drawn before the cabinet is built.
The usual answer is a chase: a boxed cavity running down behind the screen position into the base cabinet, closed with a panel that comes off with two screws, so a cable added in four years does not mean fishing a finished wall. Ask for a pull string in it, sized for the connector on an HDMI cable, not the cable alone.
The gear wants air. A receiver, a cable box and a game console all make heat, and a console in a sealed cabinet runs its fan the whole time somebody is playing. A vented bay fixes it: openings cut in the back panel or the toe, a grille or mesh insert in the door, and enough depth behind the components for cords to turn without kinking. Solid doors block a remote, so they get glass or mesh, or the gear gets a repeater.
Moving an outlet, adding a recessed box behind the screen or bringing a new circuit to the wall is an electrician’s trip, not the cabinet shop’s. The shop builds to whatever location you give it, and the electrician comes before the install, not after.
How much clearance does cabinetry need around a firebox?
Whatever that firebox’s own manual says. That is the honest answer and the safe one. Manufactured fireplaces and gas inserts publish clearances to combustible material, including how high a mantel of a given projection has to sit above the opening. Masonry fireplaces answer to hearth and chimney rules instead. The number comes off a label or a manual, and a shop that has built a few of these asks for it.
The masonry changes the plan more than the clearance does. A chimney breast in the older homes through Old Owensboro is a mass of brick projecting into the room, so the wall is not one plane. Cabinetry to either side sits back from the breast, and the hearth extension eats floor depth in front, so base cabinets stop where it starts.
Put those together and you get the wall most of these rooms end up with: the fireplace left as the fireplace, the television on the cabinetry to one side at the height a seated person watches it, and shelving carried over so the wall reads as one piece instead of two ideas. The custom built-ins page shows how that wall goes together as cabinetry.
What does a media wall look like in a brick-ranch den?
Low and long, because the ceiling is. The dens in Wesleyan Heights and Hillcrest usually run eight feet, with the fireplace on the end wall, a window stretched out beside it, and paneling from the era when every den had it. A tall tower fights that room. A run of base cabinets with shelving above, stopped short of the ceiling or carried into a shallow crown, fits it.
The window is the opportunity. A seat built to sill height with drawers underneath turns dead wall into storage the den never had, and it pulls the bookcase on the far side into the same piece. Those drawers need full-extension slides, because whatever goes under a window ends up at the back.
Settle the paneling first. Sheet paneling over studs comes off and leaves the cabinetmaker a flat wall and real fastening. Over plaster it is a different conversation. Before the measure, pull the old console away and look at the wall behind it. That strip is usually a shade darker than the rest of the room, which is what the new finish actually has to sit next to.
Which parts of a media wall should close?
Closed at the bottom, open above. The base is where the things nobody wants to look at live: controllers, cords, board games, the stack of DVDs still in the house. Doors or deep drawers take the daily abuse. Above the screen line, open adjustable shelves keep the piece from reading as a wall of doors, and the heights move later.
Two details get decided too late. Lighting is the first. Strip or puck lights in the shelves need a driver location, a switch and a wire run, and all three belong on the electrician’s list beside the outlet move. The second is what the base really stores. If the honest answer is blankets, folding chairs and a vacuum, say so and the shop builds different boxes, the same way closet and mudroom storage follows its contents.
What does a fireplace or media wall cost in Owensboro?
Built-ins run $350 - $900 per linear foot of run installed, finish included, and a full fireplace or media wall lands at $6,000 - $18,000. Paint-grade poplar or maple under a sprayed finish sits at the low end. Stained hardwood, drawers instead of doors, integrated lighting and vented door panels push it up, and each should show as its own line on the estimate. The cost page lays out what moves a cabinetry number here.
What it leaves out is where media-wall budgets go wrong: the television, the mount, the electrician’s visit, any stone or mantel work, and the gear itself. Who should build the piece is a separate question, and the cabinet maker versus carpenter guide sorts it. A media wall with drawers, doors and a sprayed finish is shop work, while a painted shelf wall around a firebox can go either way.
Why does the shop want the screen size before it draws anything?
Because the screen is the fixed rectangle everything else gets laid out around. Its width sets the opening between the cabinetry, its center sets the height of the horizontal lines, and the mount depth sets how far the case stands off the wall. A drawing made before that number is known gets redrawn.
Four answers make the drawing real:
- The screen: its size now, whether the next one will be bigger, and the mount type. A fixed plate and a full-motion arm need different backing and depth.
- Which components are staying, which are going, and what is arriving. Measure the deepest one, connectors included.
- The firebox: gas insert, manufactured unit or masonry, with the model information off the plate.
- Where power and cable are now, where they need to be, and who is moving them.
With those in hand, measure once more from where you actually sit: floor to eye level in your own chair, and the distance from the chair to the wall. Write both on the same page as the screen size. The shop lays out the horizontal lines off eye level, and a drawing made without that number usually puts them too high.