We Moved Our TV Into The Master Bedroom - I Have Feelings About It And I Know You All Do Too

We did something very controversial. According to the heated debates, there are two types of people in this world: The TV in the bedroom people, and the people that wouldn’t dare put a TV in the bedroom. Whelp, Ross and I are now officially TV in the bedroom people. Hear me out.

Our den has been our TV room ever since we moved in. It’s a smallish 11’x11’ room with a couch and a TV - that’s about it. Sure, there’s artwork, and a chair, and a lamp, and a pretty paint color, but the room is a space for watching our favorite shows. The couch is a pull-out sofa so it does double duty as a guest room, but it doesn’t see many overnight guests, so it’s truly just a room for watching the old tube.

The den is adjacent to our master bedroom and it can sort of feel like the two rooms are basically a master suite. It’s just the two of us living here, the rooms are interconnected, our temporary closet is in the den, and we walk through the den to get to the bathroom. So maybe with the master suite feel we could say that we’ve had the TV in the master suite all along? No? Sure, not really an argument, but I’m just setting the tone for how we use our home.

Our evening routine often goes as follows:

6:30 make dinner

7:00 eat dinner on the couch in front of the TV

9:30 fall asleep on the couch with the TV going

10:00 wake up to put dishes away and crawl into bed

Yeah. I’m a 9:30 bedtime kinda lady, and Ross has taken after me, too. Sometimes we’re civilized and we eat at the table. Sometimes we stay up late, sometimes we host friends and don’t watch TV, and sometimes Ross is out of town so I do my own thing. But oftentimes, this is our jam.

I’m not ashamed to say we love watching television and movies. I think TV gets a bad rap, but I genuinely think that with the right shows, it makes me a better human with more empathy. And with the trashy shows, it makes me more relaxed which is far better than my normal anxious self.

This girl is literally me with food, music, and TV - I’m hardly exaggerating. (be sure to watch to the end!)

ALL this to say. I’m team television.

We’ve been loving watching our favorite shows and movies in the den and we didn’t think to change it anytime soon. The room is underutilized as a guest room, so it works well as our media room.

But then COVID-19 hit and Ross has been without work. As you maybe already know, he works in audio for corporate events and often travels to work on major productions with big crowds. But since we aren’t gathering groups of people now or in the immediate future, he’s been home and going a bit stir-crazy without work.

To give him a creative outlet at home, we set up his electronic drum kit. And what better place to put it than the den. Suddenly, we saw this room having more potential.

And then renovations started and it creeped into the den. When the hole from closet was cut, we tarped everything, and then cleaned up and resumed normal TV viewing that day. When the vestibule was installed, we did the same. But this past week, drywall started and we knew it’d be far messier and last even longer. So, we emptied the room of art and small furnishings, collapsed the drum set (sorry Ross!) and moved the couch to the other side of the room.

We tried watching our evening shows perpendicular to the TV for one night, but then Ross has the bold idea to test moving the TV to the bedroom where we could fully recline for our evening viewing, and so we could just leave the den alone and treat it like it needed to be treated. A part of the construction site.

So, that brings us to today.

We moved the TV into the master bedroom and plopped her on the gooorgeous walnut dresser. I had to rearrange a few things, but it was a pretty smooth transition. The big lamp was replaced with a small plant, the tiny framed prints moved elsewhere, and the suspicious lady has been scootched over but still in her prominent place on the dresser.

The whole set up includes our TV (ours is 6+ years old, but here’s the modern-day version), the Sonos Playbase (for premium sound), the Apple TV (for streaming all of our shows on our old TV and for getting a nicer interface). You can ignore the two wireless charging pads seen sitting on the Sonos - those are for charging our phones. Everything into an outlet behind the dresser and the internet-based shows are streamed wirelessly from our router in the other room. The wires are all invisible thanks to some strategic cable management.

In addition to hiding the cables, we also covered up the Samsung logo with some electrical tape to reduce the visual clutter. We tried covering up the Sonos logo too, but then realized that the infrared receiver is there and covering it up prevented us from being able to adjust the volume on the remote. Darn.

Side note: Ross saw me editing the above photo and he thought, “wow, why are Ashley’s arms so hairy?!” before realizing those are his hands. So yeah, Ross is a hand model and doesn’t even know it.

What about the Samsung Frame TV, you might ask? Well. I do think it’s a super slick TV that’s so skinny it can pass as framed artwork. I mean, how cool that we’ve come this far with TV design?!

However, I think The Frame TV isn’t necessary unless it can shine in particular applications. 1. On a wall that doesn’t have any furniture to sit on and needs to be elevated and also not take up depth like in a walkway. 2. In a common area that has a lot of traffic and you’d rather see it display artwork while not in use rather than the plan black screen.

Our house doesn’t have either of those needs, and our 6-year-old TV is just fine. One day we might get a Frame TV, but we just can’t justify it now.

While our old TV doesn’t have the fancy technology to show artwork all day with a dimmed background and energy conservation, I was able to get it to display this piece Epic (1959) by Judith Godwin. To display artwork on your Apple TV, make an iCloud photo album full of your favorite artworks or family photos, then set the Apple TV screensaver to display that album as a slideshow. Of course, the screen will be bright so it will look like a TV, and it will drain energy, so I don’t really recommend it. Sure, it’s a nice idea at a party when you want guests to enjoy the images, but it’s not really an everyday thing.

I used the existing TV and electronics, and I rearranged the top of the dresser with art and whatnot from things I already owned. Why go buy stuff when what I already have works just fine?!

We’ve only been living with the TV in the bedroom for a few days, so ask me in a couple of months if I want to keep it here or move it back to the den when we’re done with construction. I’m never committed to anything, so I just might want to put it back. But for now, it’s working well. I have to work on sitting more upright to prevent falling asleep too quickly, but I’ll practice.

I feel like this is really going to help with my late-night eating because I don’t want food in bed. It was too easy to grab ice cream or snacks after dinner and gnaw on treats while watching the tube. Maybe I discovered the most effective weight loss hack?

And there you have it! The story of how we ended up with a TV in our master bedroom and my take on it. Are you team TV in the bedroom or team no TV in the bedroom?

P.S. I’ll give a gold star to anyone that recognizes what TV show I had on when I photographed the above photo. It’s only one of my favorite shows ever, and I’ve definitely recommended you all watch it in my Weekly Roundup blog posts.