DIY Faux TV Frame Tutorial: Create a Stylish Frame for Your TV

If you, like me, like the look of fancy frame TVs but don’t want to spend $1,500 on a television, then this DIY faux TV frame tutorial is for you. We love this because it perfectly compliments our DIY overgrouted stone fireplace.

I see designers all the time in magazines and on HGTV who create living spaces without TVs (which I assume is because they’re ugly and distracting), but, like, we’re all plopping down at the end of a long day of existing and watching Love is Blind, right?

Let’s just be honest and practical here and recognize we aren’t going to spend our nights around the family puzzle table.

Anyway, now that rant’s over, I do agree that TVs are clunky-looking and hard to make cute. So, in lieu of spending $1,500 on a frame TV, we recently spent a weekend figuring out how to make a faux frame TV out of some molding and the secret weapon of all DIYers: Rub n’ Buff.

Learn how we did it with our DIY faux TV frame tutorial.

Tools & Materials

• Molding – the type you use is personal preference depending on the look you like, but we used this one
• Black Spray Paint
• Rub n’ Buff
• 1×2 (or scrap wood)
• Miter saw
• L brackets
• Screwdriver & ½” screws
• Wood glue
• Remote control extender (optional, but recommended)
• Sander

Steps:

Measure

First, you’ll need to measure your tv screen and figure out how big the frame opening will be. You obviously don’t want to obstruct the screen in any way, but you also don’t want the main part of the tv showing so take time to get a super accurate measurement!

Cut

Then, with your miter saw cut the molding pieces at 45-degree angles, cutting outward from the measurement of the TV screen (so that the widest part of the finished piece will be longer than the screen width). When you’ve got all four pieces cut, they should be able to come together as a basic frame and the opening should be the size of the TV screen. It’s worth holding up each piece to the TV at this point to make sure your measurements are right because it’ll be much harder to fix once it’s assembled.

Brace

Next, flip over one of the long pieces of the frame and one of the shorter pieces to make a corner. Add a small line of wood glue along the seams, then put the L-shaped bracket on that corner seam, making sure a couple of the screw holes are on each side. Use a screwdriver (or a drill if you’d prefer) to add screws. The wood on this type of molding is pretty soft and they aren’t long screws, so it should be easy enough to do just by hand if you only have a screwdriver.

Repeat on the other sides until you’ve got a brace and wood glue in all four corners.

Beef it up

Take your 1x2s and line them up along the back of the frame so the long face of the 1×2 is flush with the outside of the frame. These pieces are just to hide the side/back of the TV and to make the frame a bit beefier.

Add a line of wood glue along the back of the molding frame, then use a nail gun to shoot in a few nails from the front of the frame into the 1x2s and secure them in place. Take a couple of pieces of scrap 1×2 if you’ve got ‘em and nail them along the top of the frame in the back, underneath the 1×2 on the frame. This will create a little block to stop the frame sliding forward when it’s on the tv.

Use some wood filler to fill in all those nail holes. Leave the wood filler to dry (and the glue to set up a bit) for an hour or so, then use a baby wipe or wet paper towel to ‘sand’ off the excess wood filler. You could use sandpaper, too, but with the nooks and crannies of the molding detail, I find a baby wipe to be easiest.

Paint

For this antique frame look, you’ll want to start with a base coat of black spray paint. Prop up the frame on something so it’s up off the ground (little sample paint cans or pieces of scrap wood work for this), and give the whole thing a good coat of black spray paint, making sure to alternate angles so all the molding detail gets good coverage. Let that dry then do a second coat if needed.

Rub n’ Buff

This is where it starts looking really good! If you haven’t used Rub n’ Buff before, a little bit goes a very long way. I’ve tried all kinds of methods to apply Rub n’ Buff in the past and by far the easiest and best-looking is using an old or cheap makeup brush to dab it on there.

So, grab a paper plate or piece of cardboard and dab a penny-sized dollop of the Rub n’ Buff on there. Lightly dunk the makeup brush into the gold and start dabbing it onto the black frame. This is a bit of a learning process – and personal preference – so just keep going until you get the look you like. For me, I don’t want the entire thing to be covered in gold or else I would’ve just spray painted it gold, ya know? So make sure if you’re going for that antique look to let a little bit of the black peek through.

Hang the frame

That’s the last major step of the DIY faux TV frame tutorial. You should be able to just go ahead and hang the frame on the TV. If you’ve got a sensor in front of your TV, measure where that is and drill a hole over that spot so your remote will still work. If that’s still causing some trouble, we recently bought this remote control extender which is such a great solution. It has one end that points out into the room and one that points directly at the sensor and I’m obsessed with it.

A second issue that could be a problem depending on your TV’s height and if you tilt it at all is that the frame may swing a little bit away from the bottom. To fix this, you could easily just stick a command strip along the bottom part of the frame (inside out of view) to secure it to the TV, but swinging shouldn’t be an issue unless your screen is up really high.

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