Having a home office makes working from home a pleasure, but not when you have to live with (and look at) a stack of modems, routers, ethernet cables, power cords, external hard drives, and the like it can make you wonder if you'd be better off with a commute. A few years ago, I decided to tackle the mess under my desk by installing (almost) everything beneath the last shelf of a teacart. Here's how I did it.
Equipment
A teacart
3/16-inch L-shaped support hooks
Velcro cable ties
Adhesive velcro
Powerstrip
1. Depending on how thick the shelves are on your teacart, you may want to strengthen them. My teacart was super thin -- like cardboard thin, so I decided to install a piece of wood (leftover from Ikea’s Antonius shelf), on the underside of the bottom shelf so that I had something more substantial to screw all my components into.
2. Secure your power strip, broadband router, VoIP router, and anything else you need but don't want to look at on the wood plank using 3/16-inch L-shaped support hooks. I used two for each peripheral.
3. Start plugging in all the cables into their respective ports and wrapping up excess cords with Velcro cable ties.
4. Stick the hook side from a roll of adhesive Velcro on the underside of the teacart in order to stick your Velcro cable ties to. I put some Velcro on my VoIP router, along with the router's large power box so I could stick the box onto the router.
Additional Notes: It'll look a bit insane from below, but when righted and wheeled into its spot it can really clean up a space.
(Images: soniaz)
© 2010 Apartment Therapy
wowowow! good job!!! :)
i bought the belkin concealed power strip. which i do love. however, i'm finding my problem with organizing the cables is that when i need to unplug ANYTHING, or, for that matter, plug IN anything, it is the most annoying process ever. it is SO not organized within the concealer! thankfully, it conceals well.
i am most proud of putting the wireless printer, cable modem, and netgear router all in the hall closet! it's really made me happy :)
view kdkaboom's profile
From the viewpoint of getting everything out of the way, it's great to attach things to the bottom or back of a desk or table, but if you have to tweak your connection or reset a device, it's a real pain to access them.
While I know it's not "pretty", I prefer to have devices where I can see what their lights are telling me rather than sticking them so far out of the way.
I made a custom stand to do this and you can't see the wires my way either.
http://tinyurl.com/55bh5d
However, I'm guessing this would be a pretty bad solution for minimalists.
view Orchid64's profile
kdkaboom,
do you mind sending me pics of your solution? Interested in seeing what you did. You can catch me at sonia (at) apartmenttherapy (dot) com.
Orchid64, what does your wiring situation look like? I like how your routers fits so nicely underneath your monitor stand, but I'm curious what the cable sitch looks like.
-s
view lil' soso's profile
Surely! I'd be delighted to share! I'll try and get some good photos taken today or over the weekend. Cheers!
view kdkaboom's profile
On Oprah a few days ago, Nate Berkus (sp?) had a solution to this...
He cut a hole in the side of a nice box (no, he didn't stick his dick in the box :P). Then he stuck all the ugly wires in in and put the lid on - voila, all gone!
view jackie_22's profile
Weeee! Dickinabox reference!
Jackie, that box trick - I've seen that around before on AT. The issue people had with it was all the heat building up inside from the power strip or something. I dunno, whatev. I just loved your SNL reference ;)
view kdkaboom's profile
lil' soso: The cables fall freely behind my desk (which has a metal grate back with quite tiny holes which can't be seen through) so they are out of sight.
The stand cost $4 (and zero skill) to make, btw.
view Orchid64's profile
this is brilliant! I never would have thought of that!!!
view piffdos's profile
Chaos averted!!! Very nice.
I can't help but think our grandkids are going to look at pictures/posts like this and laugh at how convoluted everything was wirewise "back in the old days". :-)
view LilyC's profile