I LOVE MY HIDDEN VISION TV MOUNT!! It was a Christmas gift in 2011. Watching tv in bed couldn't be more comfortable. I wear eye glasses with progressive lens. It use to be very hard to watch tv in bed,but with the Hidden Vision TV Mount I can lay on my back and the tv is in a perfect location. HDTV is intense!! Very fun to watch a powerful action movie in the dark! I'm a photographer, so being able to hide the tv and use one of my landscape images is a HUGE PLUS! Never enough room for beautiful photography.

Thanks for all of the ideas. I will look into the cord winders, cable ties, etc. Jeannine, the computer is on the left side. You can see the monitor if you look closely - just a sliver as it is a side view. All of the "stuff" is to the left of that. Ideefixe, yes I did plant the flag. I have made several changes since this pic. I bought a new desk lamp ("antique" apothecary), put a different lamp behind the desk, filled in the credenza, bought a tropical palm for the area between the credenza and the window. Right now it might be the baskets to start. That would be pretty easy. DS just bought a house and tonight I am going to help him strip 100 years of paint off the woodwork - so not much time this weekend -- but I do want to get all of these cords tucked away.

A few years ago, DH asked for a giant flat screen tv for Father's Day ~ so sweetly and pitifully, that I couldn't say no . . . although I wanted to! The problem was that our family room has only one (semi)unbroken wall to it and anything on that wall competes with our hand-painted kiva fireplace in the corner right next to it. AND, to complicate matters even more, that wall (pretty much the entire house, actually) is made of real adobe bricks, which look awesome but are a bear to try and hang anything even kind of heavy on. Too heavy or put a nail in at the wrong angle and you can end up with a 3" wide and deep hole, where adobe dirt and hay fell out of the brick . . . and you can forget ever hanging anything on that brick again, even once it's patched! I really wanted an EC like Goldie's that had a wood back to hang the tv on, but it would have totally overwhelmed the room :~( A great credenza, like Haley's or Bepeace's, would have been nice but I was afraid to hang the tv on the adobe wall and I couldn't find one to hold ~AND HIDE~ all of our DVDs, tapes, and components. I wasn't so concerned with hiding the tv, but thought that the components and DVDs would clutter up the area too much. And then we found a tv lift console that solved all our problems- it hides lots of stuff inside of it and the tv sits down in it, as well, when we aren't watching it. When it's down, it doesn't compete with our fireplace, which is a huge bonus in our small family room! I do have to tell you, though, that it was a huge PIA to actually get that tv hung on the console's hanging bars! But now that it's done, we love it. The motor is quiet and smooth and the remote easy to use. Another downside, for anyone contemplating buying one, is that you can't put anything on the top of the console, decoration-wise, as the back two-thirds of the top section opens up as the tv slides up. We bought a narrow tower to sit next to it and I have a lamp on that. We also have a set of three framed Indian artifacts that we've hung over the console. They were a huge PIA to center, but they work with the kiva instead of competing with it. So, that's one more solution to consider, not so much to hide your tv, as ours seems to be up more than it's down like most people, I guess, but it is a tv hanging/storage place. I do want to make it VERY clear that I'm not criticizing leaving a tv out on display all the time. I think it's a perfectly ok thing to do. I just wanted to show you another option for any flat screen tv and explain why we went with this option. Lynn Our flat screen up, before we hung our art over it: And with the tv down:

kellilou, that is a lovely and interesting floor plan. You're right, you've got a lot going on in that room. Open floor plans are challenging. I can see why you want to put it above the FP, but really and truly before paper goes to reality, you should rig your TV to that height and watch it that way for a couple weeks. I suppose with a few changes you could move the fireplace into the foyer area, which could be very cozy. But of course you are going to want it to be the focal point of your family room. I'm stumped! I would not want to see you move the FP to the the right of where it is now (in the corner) and the TV where the FP now is. We have that situation in this house -- corner FP and no place to put the TV cabinet but on the adjacent wall. Thanks to a very talented and expensive designer, it has been worked out to look good. But it is not optimal!