These are the questions New Dorp households ask that we rarely hear elsewhere: living rooms over garages, flats over shops, floors that move and walls that are full. Shorter questions about booking and the visit are in the FAQ further down, and the Staten Island soundbar page covers the borough-wide ones such as shared townhouse walls and stone-veneer fireplaces.
Attached and semi-attached houses
Our semi-attached house has the living room directly above the garage — will the subwoofer boom down through the garage ceiling?
It can, and it is one of the most common surprises in New Dorp’s raised-garage houses. A subwoofer standing on the floor pushes on that floor as much as on the air. Over a basement full of soil and concrete, that energy has nowhere much to go. Over a garage, the floor is a framed deck with a large, hollow, usually uninsulated space beneath it and a thin metal door at one end — very close to a drum. The result is bass that sounds bigger in the garage, in the utility room and sometimes in the house next door than it does on the sofa.
The fixes are mostly about position and setting, not equipment. We keep the subwoofer off the middle of the floor span, where the joists flex most, and put it near a wall or corner where the floor is supported, ideally a wall that doesn’t sit over the garage door header. A dense pad or a heavy rug under the sub helps a little; turning the sub’s level down a few steps and letting the bar’s room-correction routine set the crossover helps a lot more. If the bar offers a night or reduced-bass mode, we show you where it is.
If the living room is mostly over the garage and you watch late, a bar with a built-in woofer and no separate subwoofer can be the better buy. It will never shake the room the way a sub does, but it won’t shake the garage either. We would rather tell you that before you buy than after the sub is unboxed.
In our attached house the front wall is mostly window and door, the back opens to the kitchen and one side is shared — which wall is actually left for the TV?
Usually the long wall opposite the party wall, and usually only part of it, because that is where the staircase runs. That still works. In most of these houses the stair is open on the living-room side or enclosed by a framed partition; either way, the first few feet of that long wall nearest the front window are often clear. A TV of up to about 55 inches and a bar below it fit there, with the sofa against the party wall facing it. The geometry isn’t perfect — you may sit a little off-centre — but a soundbar copes with that far better than TV speakers, and its dialogue setting keeps voices clear from a slight angle.
The other options each have a catch. The party wall itself can carry the TV, and the shared-wall question on our borough page covers what that means for your neighbour. The front window wall can carry it only if the TV goes beside the window rather than in front of it, and screens facing a bright window wash out by day. The kitchen opening sometimes leaves a short return wall that suits a smaller TV and a compact bar, especially if the family watches from the dining table.
Whatever wall you choose, send us one photo taken from where you sit. We check the stud layout, the outlet position, the clearance to the stair rail and whether the cable can reach a cabinet or the boxes can sit under the TV. A figure for the room comes back with that check, the same working day.
Living over New Dorp Lane
Our apartment over a New Dorp Lane shop is reached by a steep, narrow side stair — can a long soundbar box and a ladder make it up?
Almost always. Full-width soundbar cartons run to about four feet long, but they are slim and light, and we carry them up on end. The awkward items are the subwoofer box, which is heavy but compact, and a stepladder, which we bring folded and carry up first. In the narrowest stairs we unbox on the landing or on the street so the cardboard doesn’t scrape your walls, and take every piece of packaging away afterwards (the box-removal line is $25 if you want that).
The Staten Island price list on this page has no stairs line for a flat over a shop. What does help is knowing in advance: the stair’s width at its narrowest point, whether there is a turn at the top, and whether the street door is shared with the shop or has its own key. If the shop opens before your appointment, tell the staff someone is coming up; if the street door is the shop’s door, make sure somebody will be there to open it inside our two-hour window.
Getting a TV up the same stair is a different matter. Screens of 75 inches and up arrive in very large, rigid boxes that don’t bend around a turn. If you are planning a new TV as well, measure the stair before you order, or ask the store about delivery to the room; we can then hang it and fit the bar below it in one visit, priced from the Staten Island TV lines further down.
The ceiling in our apartment over the stores is a dropped grid of tiles — can the soundbar cable run above it?
Sometimes, but it is rarely the best route, and it needs the landlord’s agreement first. A suspended ceiling in a flat often hides old plaster, pipes, ductwork and other people’s cables, and in mixed-use buildings it can be part of a fire-separation arrangement between the shop and the homes above. Cables must not be laid loose on the tiles, and anything run there should be supported on its own and rated for the space it passes through.
What usually makes more sense is shorter: the TV, the bar and the boxes on the same wall, with the HDMI and power dropping straight down behind the TV to a console. On plaster or steel studs, a slim painted cord cover ($59) does that neatly without opening anything. If the boxes must live across the room, the cable run line ($99, up to 25 feet) covers a route along the skirting or behind furniture.
If your landlord is happy with a ceiling route and the space above the grid is clean and accessible, we look at it on the day and tell you whether we would use it. We won’t lift tiles that are stained, sagging or held in with clips we can’t refit, and we won’t touch anything that belongs to the shop below.
We own a two-storey building on the Lane, with the store downstairs and our own apartment upstairs — can one visit handle both TVs, and is each priced the same way?
Yes on both counts. Each TV is priced from the same lines on this page, whether it hangs over a shop counter or a living-room console, so the shop TV and the home TV are simply two sets of rows on one quote. There is no separate commercial rate for a small shop. If you want the shop part on the business’s invoice and the apartment part on a personal one, say so when you book and we split the paperwork that way.
What changes between the two rooms is the setup, not the price. Downstairs we cap the bar’s maximum volume, turn off the features a customer could trigger from a phone (Bluetooth pairing and voice assistants), label the input, and leave the remote somewhere sensible. Upstairs we set the bar for evenings: dialogue lift, a night mode and the subwoofer level chosen with the shop closed and the street quiet.
One practical detail: if both TVs are on the same Wi-Fi, the soundbar apps will see each other. We name them clearly — “Shop” and “Living Room” — and, where the bars allow it, put them on separate networks or turn off grouping so a phone upstairs can never start music in the store.
Below Hylan Boulevard
Our converted New Dorp Beach bungalow sits on piers and the floor bounces when someone walks across — will the TV and bar shake, and where does the subwoofer go?
A wall-mounted TV and bar are the right answer in a bouncy room, because the wall moves far less than the floor. A TV on a stand or a bar on a console rocks every time someone crosses the room; the same pair on the wall stays still. We fix the bracket into the wall studs, which in a bungalow are often lighter and further apart than in a modern house, and if the studs are thin or the wall is boarded we spread the load with a plywood backer board ($85) across several of them.
The subwoofer is the harder part. On a light floor over a crawl space, a sub excites the whole floor, and you feel it in your feet as much as hear it. We place it on the stiffest part of the floor — near an outside wall or over a beam rather than mid-span — and turn it down until the floor stops buzzing. In a small bungalow living room, a bar with built-in bass may simply sound better than any separate sub.
We don’t route cables down through the floor into the crawl space. Parts of New Dorp Beach, between Marine Way and Tysens Lane, sit at or below sea level and flood regularly, and anything under the house is the first thing water reaches. Cables go along the wall or behind furniture instead, and every plug goes to one surge strip above the floor.
Our house was rebuilt after Sandy and the walls are filled with spray-foam insulation — can a cable still be fished inside them?
Not usually, and we won’t force it. Spray foam, especially the closed-cell kind, fills the stud bay completely and sets hard. A fish tape can’t pass through it, and cutting a channel means opening the wall and breaking the air and insulation seal the builder worked to achieve. Fibreglass batts are different: a cable can often be eased down beside them, so it is worth knowing which insulation your builder used.
There are good alternatives. If an interior wall carries the TV — a partition between rooms rather than an outside wall — it is often uninsulated or loosely filled, and the in-wall kit ($169) goes in normally. If the TV must be on an insulated outside wall, a painted cord cover ($59) from the bar down to a console is tidy and invisible from the sofa. And in a new build, the boxes can often live in a cabinet directly beneath the TV, so the only visible cable is a short one.
If you are still building or renovating, there is a better answer: ask the contractor to set an empty conduit or a recessed media box between the TV position and the cabinet before the foam goes in. That costs little at framing and leaves a clean route for every future TV. Our structured cabling team on Staten Island can plan it with your builder.
The desk in the teenager’s room
Our teenager wants one compact bar on the desk to play both the gaming PC and the console — can it switch between them?
Yes, provided the bar has the right inputs, and many compact bars do. The neatest arrangement uses the monitor as the hub: the PC and the console both plug into the monitor by HDMI or DisplayPort, the monitor’s audio output feeds the bar, and switching the monitor’s input switches the sound with it. That works when the monitor has a headphone or optical output, which most gaming monitors do.
The alternative is a bar with two inputs — say optical from the console and USB or Bluetooth from the PC — selected with the bar’s remote or app. It works, but somebody has to remember to switch, and Bluetooth adds a delay that gamers notice. For games we prefer a wired connection and turn on the bar’s low-latency or game mode, then check lip-sync with a test clip.
On a desk, a compact bar sits on a small stand or on the desk itself in front of the monitor foot; a wall mount is rarely needed. The console-placement line ($79) covers it, and the streaming device or games console line ($49 each) covers setting each source to the right input.
