We have beautiful built-in shelves in our living room, and our TV rests on one of them. With a TV comes cords: cable cord, power cord, cord to the DVR box, plus a power strip.
Before
That’s a lot of not-so-attractive cords. I came up with this great (and inexpensive!) idea for how to hide them.
Here’s what you’ll need:
– An Ikea BRANÄS basket, with the bottom removed or not installed, and
– A flat-head screwdriver. Really, that’s it!
The basket is held together with tabs that are simply stapled to the sides of the basket:
What you’re going to do is create a three-sided basket. To do this, remove the tabs for one side of the basket. Use the flat-head screwdriver to pry up the tabs and staples. This isn’t hard to do, I promise. You’ll end up removing four tabs – two on each side of that side of the basket.
Still with me? Good – because you’re pretty much done!
Now that you have a three-sided basket, slide it around the cords. Because the cords I’m hiding here come through a hole in the left back of the built-in shelf, I slid the basket around the cords with the left side (against the wall, close to the hole) as the open side.
The great thing is that you can adjust the three sides to fit around your cords, wherever they are on or around the shelf!
Now we only see the cords running from the floor/plug to the basket and not the whole mess of cords.
So much better!
And, as you can see from the clock in the pictures, this project took me a whopping 16 minutes.
For more storage and organization tips, please click HERE.
A "recovering lawyer," I turned in my power suits for power tools and a life of DIY. I believe in merging old and new to make a house a home.
Great solution here! We tried a 4 sided basket and put the modem inside (it blinks continually and sits under the tv in the guest room) and I thought all was fine. Turns out the wireless signal for my computer down the hall, and all other devices downstairs, was being affected! Subtle, but it was slowing things down. But you don’t have a modem in here , right? The amount of cords etc. is really quite amazing these days……
Crazy! Yes, I didn’t want the cords inside a basket (plus that would have required unplugging and replugging everything – ugh!), so that’s why I came up with this solution. No modem here, though. But it would help to have one open side, I bet (plus no basket bottom).