Lair Improvement – Cable Management on a Budget

Today’s tip is budget cable management and I can think of three main techniques I use:

First, the simple and expedient method of using wood staples or hammer-in cable clips to fasten cables to wood surfaces. (The latter can often be found at dollar stores in packs of 25 to 200)

Second, for larger or more numerous cables, one can always buy screw-in hooks and then run the cables through them. I often use this technique for routing cables along the underside of my home-made desk, but it’s not very pretty, so I avoid it for places where the cables will be visible.

Finally, if you want to keep cables off the floor without them looking ugly, I recommend finding a dollar store which sells “cable tidy” kits (Essentially split plastic tubing and a tool to easily feed cable into it. Make sure you get the gray kind rather than the black kind) and then picking up some screw-in hooks (coated in white-plastic, if you have painted baseboards) and sized to fit the cable tidy tubing.

Then it’s just a matter of running the cables through the sleeve, screwing the hooks into your baseboard, and popping the bundle of cables into the hooks. Voila! Instant unobtrusive cable conduit that can be swept under without hassle.

Of course, no cable is exactly the right length. For bundling up excess cable, I recommend plastic cable ties. They’re cheap (From $1 to $5 for 100, depending on what size you’re buying), easy to use, and they work better than any of the alternatives I’ve tried. For a little extra, you can get reusable versions of the larger sizes… which I find very helpful as a way to store cables which won’t be staying in one place.

Lair Improvement – Cable Management on a Budget by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.