Adventures in Remuddling

Not too long ago, the CRT monitor used to take up a significant portion of real estate on people’s desk. These days, flat panel displays have largely solved that problem. But we want to take our desk back. Entirely…

And it might seem we like to mount things on walls (see wall mounted radiator), we do as long as it’s not plates.

This was not too hard to set up. The hardest part was figuring out what kind of mount to get, what manufacturer, and where to get it. Ergotron seems to be the company that sells the most mounts at a fairly reasonable price. They also sell some higher end stuff too. Before you get anything, be sure the mount you buy can support the weight of the monitor.

That said, after the research was done (wall mount that can support 12 lb. monitor), the next thing was to find out where to buy it. Froogle and pricegrabber come in handy. But instead of relying on the lowest price, I went with a trusted name in online shopping,… Amazon. Amazon seems to sell everything these days, even power tools. Although Amazon was about $10 more expensive than the dirt cheap places, it was cheaper than other big names like buy.com, dell, office depot, etc. And Amazon has a simple and easy return policy (I returned a circular saw blade a few months ago).

It took a week to get the product, but it finally came in today.

The parts inside the box:

Nothing complicated here. It is all solidly constructed. The only part that would have been helpful is a wall mounting plate (which they sell separately). Fortunately for me, there was a stud exactly where the base hinge was to be mounted.

Now the whole thing can probably be set up in an hour or less, but I always take my time and think things through. I learned my lesson not to blindly trust manufacturers’ instructions (mail slot fiasco). So I dry fitted everything, making sure the parts work, the position is correct, etc. I also put down some red rosin paper to contain the plaster dust to ease in cleaning up.

In about two hours, the whole process was completed. You can even stuff the cords for the monitor inside the arm of the mount.

This is the view from my side, the very first picture in the post is when the monitor is rotated and viewed on her side.

And the following picture is the monitor tucked against the wall.