apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

the one place i lived didn't care if you drilled holes all over the place and the cable guys did it too, so it run internet to our rooms there were holes in the corners with the cables coming out.

My new place is a lot nicer though and in the living room they actually put cable jacks on both of the main walls so you can arrange as you please.

When we switched from cable to satellite, we used the installation as an opportunity to reorient the living room.

I run long cables and tuck them against the corner of the wall.

I recently went through this having moved into a new flat the couches were huge and did not provide an adequate viewing distance for the HDTV. I ended up modelling the whole room and furniture in google sketch-up. It was then easy to figure out a layout that was conducive to a decent viewing distance, without having to shift furniture around!

I love my "charming" old apartment-- really I do-- but my cable-forced room layout is also influenced by the presence of a radiator and which of the electrical outlets are grounded. Rearranging (which I have done once since moving in) is like putting together a puzzle!

I have floor-length curtains on the windows that help hide the extension cords. Fortunately (?) it's a small room.

If you're planning on staying for awhile you can hire a third party contractor, i.e. *not* from the cable company, to come out and install another outlet. Make sure that the location is discreet and the plate cover matches the ones already in your apartment.

When I moved in, the only connection was in the dining room! I found a guy with references on craigslist and he added an outlet in the living room for under $100.

My apartment came with an extra 5m of coaxial coming out of the wall, and I don't have cable. I'm on 100% internet tv. The coaxial just kind of sits there, behind the furniture, lonely...

We ran an extension about 6 feet, to a vaguely acceptable location - I really want it on the opposite wall, across the fireplace and front door, but there is no acceptable way to get the cable there without drilling through a 4" concrete slab...

I live in a 1924 building in San Francisco, where the cable enters the unit near the window in my dininutive dining room. First, I mounted a splitter near the window on the baseboard trim. From there, I run a cable up the wall to a small shelf, to my cable modem and wireless router. From the other "OUT" connection on the splitter I run nearly 75' of coaxial above the baseboard and over/around two door frames to cover the roughly 20' from the splitter to the television. It was a chore to run the cable properly, but cable itself is relatively cheap. With enough of it and a staple gun to keep the cable in place, you can get around to virtually any location you want. At it's terminus near the cable box, I've got another splitter. If I ever want or need to move my cable modem, I've got a connection on that end of the studio for the cable.

I'm considering canceling my cable to save money. I dream of madly slicing up and removing every square inch of cable from the apartment, patching and painting over every single hole they made in the walls and making the place look as though there had never been cable there. Then, I imagine innocently calling the cable company in six months and signing up for cable. This time I would be there when they installed it and insist that they put it in reasonable places!
My downstairs neighbor would be grateful, as the cable comes into her apartment through the floor and continues up the side wall of her closet to my floor. Whose idea was that?

I think it's ok to have your cable box away from your TV, if that's an issue you're dealing with. It may work anyway, to have your media components in a cabinet near where the coax comes into your apartment.

Then you can run your HDMI and other wires through the walls (or behind a faux-molding) toward your tv. As long as the media center/cable box is still accessible for the remote, then who cares where it is.

The only issue I would see of this is I swear I can only find HDMI cables at a maximum of 6' lengths.

When I for about 6 months had cable, I had to get lengths of cable and string along the baseboards to connect up 2 TV's as I only had one cable connection on the north wall by the north window and that's the wall where the electric baseboard heat is as well so that was not a conducive spot.

I simply bought a short piece, about 3" or so, added a splitter and about 6 Ft to the TV in the living room and 20" or so into the bedroom and I was fortunate that I was able to simply route it along the baseboard, into the doorway of the bedroom, along the back of the closet before entering ouit and along the north wall of the bedroom before terminating at that TV.

Today with digital transmission, I can get my local stations with ease where as with analog, I could barely get 3 of the 8 or so local stations. Right now I have a pair of rabbit ears at both TV's and will get an amplified antenna and use the existing cable run to distribute it

I forgot to add that the cable connection was in the living/dining room.

First, I think rapunzel's idea is evil genius!!!

I had this problem in my last place, so I bought matching baseboard and took it and a cable sample to a local woodshop, they routed out the material I didn't need on the wrong side of the baseboard. I was able to hide the cable from its entry point in the house to the new place where I wanted the TV, by placing it behind the baseboard, it took about a day's monkeying around to buy supplies - get the work done - install it, for under $50 including the woodshop's time (saw Tommy Silva do something similar on TOH so that was my inspiration). There was still a 5" piece showing at one end, so I painted it the same color as the wall, and I had a chair sitting in front so it was very hard to see that remainder.

Yah, we have wires running all over the place. Cable, surround sound, extension cords. Even better, there is a doorway practically on every wall. I just run them along the baseboards with those 3M hooks and try to ignore it.