Mounting a TV over a brick fireplace

In most great rooms the fireplace is the visual focal point, so that is where the television goes. It looks tidy in the room. It is also the single most regretted mounting position there is, and the regret is not structural — it is that you spend every evening looking up.

The height problem

Comfortable viewing puts seated eye level somewhere in the lower third of the screen. Over a typical mantel, the bottom of the screen is often already above seated eye level, which means you are looking up at everything for the whole film. It causes neck strain, it is worse the closer you sit, and unlike most mounting decisions there is no fixing it afterward without patching a masonry wall.

If the fireplace is genuinely the only option

• Use a tilting or full-motion mount rather than a fixed one — angling the screen down materially reduces the strain
• Mount as low as the mantel and the firebox allow, which is usually lower than people assume
• Consider a pull-down mount if the wall height forces a high position; they are expensive and they solve the problem properly
• Check heat. Some televisions tolerate the rising heat from a firebox better than others, and a projecting mantel shelf makes a large difference by deflecting it

The anchoring side

Brick, block and stone all need sleeve or wedge anchors sized to the substrate, not the lag bolts you would use in wood framing. Whether you fix into the brick face or the mortar joint matters and is not interchangeable — face fixing is generally stronger in sound brick, joint fixing is often preferred in older or softer masonry. On genuinely old brick with soft lime mortar, be conservative and take an opinion.

A common surprise is that the wall above a fireplace is frequently not masonry at all. Many newer builds have a framed chase above the firebox faced with brick or stone veneer, and behind the veneer there may be framing, or a void, or a metal flue. What is behind the surface changes the entire approach, so it has to be established before anything is drilled.

Cables

You cannot fish cable through solid masonry, and you should not be running anything inside a chase containing a flue. The realistic options are a surface raceway painted to match, or routing to one side and into an adjacent framed wall where that is possible. A recessed power-relocation kit can hide a power cord safely, but a new outlet behind the television is licensed electrical work and needs an electrician — schedule that before the mount goes up rather than after.