So, you’ve seen some of the progress happening in our front room here and here. But, what I haven’t yet described is our plan to turn this bifunctional room into one of trifunction.

At first, our front room was just an office. See here…

Then we adopted Fri (the Ikea Friheten corner sofa), so we moved our desk to the opposite wall and plopped Fri down in his new home. Thus, our office became an office/guest room. Check it…

Here he is touting his accommodating nature…

Pretty cool, huh? And he provides storage to boot…

You should’ve seen me playing with this thing in the store. I had a ball. And I received more than a few puzzled stares in response to my squeals of glee. It was fun.

Anyhoo, our next plan was to eventually purchase a larger flat screen TV to replace our computer monitor, which we would then mount to the wall with a swiveling bracket. This would allow us to use the TV as both a computer monitor AND movie-watching device. We are all about multi-function in this house. Thus, the room would become an office/guest room/extra living/movie room of sorts, which we figured would come in really handy as Lucas grows older.

A few days ago, we were fortunate enough to inherit a free flat screen TV that our family was getting rid of. It was a bit larger than we were originally thinking, but we thought it would still serve it’s purpose well. Observe…

Wee bit of an upgrade, no? When I first saw its gigantic size in comparison to our last monitor, I actually laughed out loud. It was just so much bigger than our last screen. And for some reason I found that humorous. Maybe I was just overwhelmed at the prospect of being able to see the screen sans glasses.

Anyways, I sat down in my beloved desk chair, powered on the screen, and discovered that my loving husband had left me a little surprise…..

After a significant recoil from the screen, I regrouped, looked for the hidden camera, found none, and responded with this….

After Joey found my response (and laughed), I changed my snarky mug for my all-time favorite Lucas pic…

Sweet, sweet boy.

Anyways, I digress… moving back to the project…. We picked up this swivel bracket from Walmart…

….and Joey installed it per the included instructions. It all went to plan easily, except that we had limited choice as to bracket placement due to the available studs and the way the bracket swivels. The TV is slightly off centered with the desk because of this, but ended up right in front of our chair which was serendipitous. Here’s a shot from above in the back…

See, the bracket is actually mounted in a more centered location, but for the TV to remain flat against the wall, it slides over to the left (facing) causing it to be off-center. Then, to swivel it out and angle it to watch TV from the couch, we need the space on the right-facing side. So, this was the only logical placement. But, dont get us wrong, being a smidge off-centered is a small price to pay for the function of enjoying a glare-less movie-watching experience.

Another small issue is that we will have to move the light switch over, as it’s now located behind the TV (but still reachable). We always hated that the switch is practically in the middle of the wall anyways.

So, now we have easier-to-see computer time…

And gloriously glare-free movie (ahem, Dexter) time…

So anyways, that’s our newly tri-functional space! Popcorn, anyone? 🙂