A Whole New Look

For years my brother and youngest son have been commenting that they can't believe I still have a 19 inch television.  My house isn't all that big, and it fit in well, and I could see it, so it was fine for me.

Recently a friend was moving from her big house in the country to a much smaller place in the city.  She had a TV to get rid of, and she offered it to me.  My old TV was starting to get lines at the top of the screen, but I would have lived with it for a while yet, as this isn't the best time of year for me to be spending money on a new replacement. I asked her what she wanted for her used one, and she told me she just wanted to get rid of it. It wouldn't cost me anything, but I would have to come pick it up on a specific date. 

I saw it and it looked good, and worked fine, so I lined up my hubby and son to help get it home.  It's a 27 inch conventional style television and weighs much too much for me to have been of any help at all. 

This is where the problem came in. I didn't have a stand to put it on.  It was too big for the stand I had been using for my 19 inch one.  I decided to try FreeCycle, and put out a request.

I quickly got two responses.  The first one sounded promising, but when we went to fetch it, it turned out to be smaller than the one we had previously been using.  We stopped by the son's place and found out he still had the old stand he got from us years ago.  But when we got it home, it was too small too.  We had an old desk in the garage, so we dragged it in, and set the TV on that. It just barely fit.  The little legs under the TV were half on and half off at the edges of the desk,  and I worried that this big front heavy TV might be easy to tip over if our little grandchildren came to visit. 

The desk was 30 inches high, and we found ourselves looking up.  Having this larger TV was like having an elephant in the room, especially with it up in the air like that.  The second offer I had from FreeCycle was for a cabinet but it stood 33 inches tall.  It was obvious that wouldn't do either. I started looking at stands in the stores.  They are now made mostly just to support the newer flat screen televisions.  And even then, it would cost more for one of them than it would cost me for a new TV of the size I was used to.

I likely would have decided to upsize my TV the next time we bought one, but I'm sure glad I found out about all this now, as it would have instantly cost us a lot more than expected, given that we would have needed a new stand too.  It's one of those things I never thought about before.

Luckily, one of the ladies at my paint class is also planning to sell her house, and she had just the thing at her place that she was more than happy to part with.  So now the 27 inch television has a new home, and I think it looks fine sitting in my TV corner.  There is no place to put the VCR or DVD player at the moment, but we don't use them often anyway, so that's not really a problem. 

Will I buy a new large TV someday?  That's a question I still don't have an answer to. But you can be sure it will have a flat screen so we can put it on a proper stand.  At least now I know I'll have to work that into the budget when the time times.