Wires are quite possibly the most annoying and unattractive part of any home office. Picking the right hardware and software will help, but at the end of the day you are going to have some wires that need a home. In this post I will go over a few of the ways I have hid equipment and wires in my home office.
Getting Started
The first step is getting the right equipment for the job. After a quick trip to Radio Shack and Lowes, I had all the equipment I needed.
Also, don’t forget a nice head lamp (the lengths I go to in order to create an awesome office).
Rethink desk space
All to often, a desk is cluttered with equipment that doesn’t need to be there. Routers, cable modems, wires. All these pieces of equipment sit on a desk for months (or years) at a time without being touched. Waste.
This caused me to sit back and rethink my desk space. Underneath the desk is an open slate for equipment storage and running wires. I ran with this idea and the rest of this post is focused entirely under my desk, with a beautiful Linksys router acting as the centerpiece.
The router
My goal for my favorite router, the Linksys WRT54G, was to hang it upside down under the table. I didn’t want to permanently attach it or damage the table with screws, so I choose industrial strength velcro to attach the router to the table.
My first attempt had little pieces of velcro on the legs of the router. It failed pretty quickly, as their wasn’t enough surface area on the legs to hold the adhesive velcro strips. The velcro was strong but the adhesive just wasn’t cutting it.
To remedy the situation, I popped of the legs of the router. (A lot of my ideas were inspired by the mount videos for WRT54G’s)
Then I cut a small hole in some velcro and then put a tiny bolt (from old computer parts I had stored away) through the velcro and leg. I attached a nut from the inside of the leg and reattached the legs to the router. This allowed the bolt to keep the velcro attached to the leg.
After putting the legs back on the router, I placed it under the desk and it has held strong for about a month now.
The cable modem
The cable modem was way easier because of the large surface area. I just stuck a big piece of velcro on it and slapped it under the desk.
Running wires
Running wires under the desk is pretty self explanatory, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve that I used to hide most of my wires.
Let’s start with this picture, before I started reorganizing some speaker wires.
The first thing I did was mount wire clips under the desk and run the speaker wires on the underside of the desk.
Then I simply ran the wires own the table leg to the subwoofer. I attached the wires to the leg with zip ties, as well as zip tied excess wires new the subwoofer.
Much better (at least the right half of the picture).
Next, I attached a cable organizing to the back of my desk. It was from Ikea, but it could easily be modified to work on other desks. It helped to get my powerstrip off the floor and hold some excess wires.
To run lots of wires around the desk, I created poor-mans wire clips with zip ties. It worked remarkably well, and I ran my monitor, keyboard, and speaker cables from my computer to their respective places on my desk.
The last thing I did was cluster wires to the frame with zip ties. Doing this removed the slack from the wires so they didn’t dangle under the table.
And now my home office is complete. Hope you enjoyed this series on how I built my home office.