I made a few improvements to the cabling in front too.
I reused the power outlet from the original surround and added a couple of modular plug-panels. One on the inside in the lower right corner has connections for the antenna/cable coax, the satellite HDMI connector, HDMI-2 in, and USB in.
The last two are connected to the other panel on the outside lower right corner of the cabinet.
The inner panel makes it easy to make the connections when installing the TV. The outer panel makes it trivial to connect an IPad, DVD player, or whatever without rooting around behind the TV.
In the bedroom the thieves left us with this nice mess. What’s really interesting is that the original mount was attached with two screws into one ¾ x 2” “stud”. All the other screws simply went into the paneling. I guess it’s structural. (not!)
We were faced with removing all of the cabinets and the bed structure to replace the destroyed paneling, or simply covering the hole. I was pretty sure that once removed nothing would ever go back in correctly, so we opted for the cosmetic fix.
I made a 24 x 13” plate of ¾” cabinet-grade cherry plywood. The edges were banded to make it look nice. I had to relocate the coax connection to accommodate the new mounting plate. The plate is screwed to three “studs” and is quite solid.
The “new” TV is a 28” Samsung. Actually, the new TV was nicer than what we had in our bedroom at home. Soooo, it ended up in the house and the older one was moved to the coach. It's still a bigger/better TV than the "San-who?-ee" that it replaced"!
Both the living room and bedroom TVs are on easy-to-remove mounts. They will be removed for storage from now on!
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