As you might remember, I have cord problems. They are everywhere, especially in my living room. I’ve been putting off dealing with them for the last oh… uh, two years. But I finally got around to dealing with some of them this weekend. And of course, it only took me 15 minutes and $1 to deal with them. Note to self: Do more projects you’ve been putting off.

The Before:

This is the situation I’ve been dealing with around my TV. I have three lamps, a TV, DVD player, and a digital antenna plugged into two different power strips which are all jammed behind this dresser. After writing about my cord issues, so many people inspired me with ideas. This one in particular stuck with me:

My friend Katie shared it with me. I liked it a lot, but since I’m trying to avoid spending money right now I thought I’d have to wait until I had money to buy a fancy box. But then I had a brilliant idea. A few years ago I bought four standing file boxes from the dollar spot at Target. I thought they were cute and at the time I needed them to organize papers.

I currently am only using one of them and the other three were stuck in the back of my closet. So my brilliant idea was to use them for cord management.

Here’s what I did:

1) Unfolded box

2) Inserted the power strip, and then began to fold the box back together and then snipped the box where the cord interfered with the folding.

That’s it. It was super easy.

I didn’t take a picture of the other side, but just imagine a a power strip sitting on the long side of a file box. Okay, that may be hard to imagine…

Next I started plugging everything in. I actually got rid of one of the lamps and one of the power strips so I was left with the one power strip and five cords.

Once everything was plugged in, I started to wrap the cords up. I didn’t have twist ties so I used black pony tail holders to hold them together.

Once all the cords were wrapped up, I stuffed them in the open part of the file box. At this point I realized I had no place to put the antenna box. It usually just lays around on the floor because it actually doesn’t really work. I only get three channels and those only come in sporadically so I haven’t watched live TV in two years. But it needed to go somewhere and when I noticed  it had a picture hook on the back of it, I decided I would just hang it up to get it off of the floor.

It was getting there. A few more cords wrapped and shoved in the box and voila!

Before and After:

Okay so the yellow file box doesn’t exactly blend in, but it is one step closer to a solution. My plan is to paint it, probably using the living room wall color, but I wanted to make sure it actually worked before I went to the trouble of painting it. I also still need to get a cord cover to cover the cords coming from beneath the TV. But starting the project has to count for something, right??