Hel­lo fair read­ers!  If you would be so kind, as I wel­come myself back to the screen after a month-long hia­tus, and excuse my appalling absence, I would be much oblig­ed.  As pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned, my tal­ents have since been oth­er­wise engaged in the design and re-loca­tion of the Every­day-Mod­ern World Head­quar­ters, also known as my hum­ble apartment.

Through the process of mov­ing, I had the won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ty to re-engage with exact­ly how much shit I must cart around with me to live what I deem a full and nec­es­sary life.  Once again, box­es and box­es of junk chal­lenged my stal­wart ded­i­ca­tion to min­i­mal­ism, but after weeks of chaos, I am hap­py to report that min­i­mal­ism (or it’s 530 square foot coun­ter­part) prevailed.

And after that ultra-lengthy intro­duc­tion, I am sure you are all won­der­ing where I am going with this, and what mov­ing has to do with cord man­age­ment.  Well, as you will come to see in future posts, a lot.  It all start­ed with the deci­sion to place my bookshelf/entertainment unit smack dab in the mid­dle of my stu­dio.  What promised to be a beau­ti­ful state­ment of how order­ly my life is, quick­ly became an exer­cise in patience, ded­i­ca­tion, and above all, Cable Wran­gling.  All said and done, it is stun­ning, and the secret that makes it all pos­si­ble is the abil­i­ty to coax those cords into submission.

The shelf at the bot­tom of the cab­i­net helps to add usable space, and keep the cables in their nifty lit­tle corral.

1. The first step to cable man­age­ment is to admit that you have a prob­lem.  It’s okay, don’t be shy, every­one does.  Unless you are a lud­dite (and the fact that you’re read­ing a blog gives me a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that you are not), you will have cords and cables.  So do us all a favor and stop hap­haz­ard­ly shov­ing every cable in your arse­nal through crap­py holes cut out of the back of your Kmart enter­tain­ment stand.  Kids, that’s just not how it’s done.

Plan ahead for the space to accom­mo­date the rat’s nest of cords.  Chances are, if you take the road that seems anti-min­i­mal­ism and allow more space than nec­es­sary for your enter­tain­ment sys­tem, the result will be more min­i­mal­ist.  The best part is, it doesn’t have to be a big space!  To pow­er my TV, Blu-Ray player/receiver, record play­er (yes you read that right), pre-amp, Apple TV, Apple Time Cap­sule, modem, Wii, Wii-mote charg­ing sta­tion, and Super Nin­ten­do (yes, you also read that right), I need a mere 30”W x 12”D x 2.5”H.  This charm­ing lit­tle space is built in to the bot­tom of my stereo cab­i­net, so it’s tech adja­cent and there are no cords run­ning willy nil­ly all over my apartment.

This is the bad-ass Belkin surge pro­tec­tor I was telling y’all about.

2.  The next part might seem obvi­ous, but the fact that I’m attract­ing web traf­fic with an arti­cle about orga­niz­ing cords tells me that peo­ple will Google how to do just about any­thing!  The stu­pid-obvi­ous thing I am refer­ring to is prop­er pow­er.  With a some­what in-depth tech set­up in my house, I have come to find that plug­ging things in can become a bit of a chal­lenge, espe­cial­ly since I usu­al­ly only have about one out­let to work with.

Your best bet in this case is to spend the bucks on a nice surge pro­tec­tor.  As lame as Belkin is, I must say that they get the Awe­some-Surge-Pro­tec­tor-Design-Of-The-Year-Award in my book.  Sure, there are all those nifty lit­tle pow­er strips that artic­u­late for the pain in the ass trans­form­ers, but Belkin kicks them all to the curb with their rotat­ing plug head.  No more wrestling with the tight­ly wound cable and sta­pling it to one side of the out­let so it doesn’t pro­trude from the wall like some unsight­ly fun­gal growth, just a swiv­el here, a twist there and you are golden.

Addi­tion­al­ly, when wiring any­thing with sound, make damn sure you’ve got your ground straight.  There are any num­ber of techy sites like this one http://www.epanorama.net/documents/groundloop/ but the gist of it is, don’t split your shit up over sep­a­rate grounds (ie: sep­a­rate cir­cuits).  If you have your stereo plugged into one out­let, and your Blu-Ray play­er (that runs through your stereo) plugged into an adja­cent out­let (that just hap­pens to be on anoth­er cir­cuit), you could have what we nerds like to call a “ground loop” prob­lem that man­i­fests itself as an obnox­ious buzzing in your speak­ers.  Fix this prob­lem by con­nect­ing your sys­tems to the same cir­cuit.  It’s fair­ly easy to con­nect any­thing run­ning through the same sound sys­tem into the same pow­er strip – espe­cial­ly if you’re cool and got the Belkin surge protector.

Re-train­ing your cables to fit where you want them — reward-based train­ing and a firm hand work best

3.   Plas­tic is pret­ty awe­some, I’m quite sure I couldn’t sur­vive with­out it. But when it comes to cables, there are some real­ly annoy­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics to plas­tic that just infu­ri­ate me, name­ly, the ele­phan­tine mem­o­ry.  Have you ever noticed how when you get a new piece of tech, the cable is all neat­ly wound in the box and the coils align just per­fect­ly? That is until you cut off that lit­tle clear piece of cel­lo­phane hold­ing it all togeth­er and that nice neat coil imme­di­ate­ly turns into a big pile of spaghet­ti.  That, folks, would be the mem­o­ry to which I am referring.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as plas­tic ages, it nev­er seems to lose its mem­o­ry.  This can become a Cable Wran­glers night­mare.  Through­out my long years of cord coer­cion, I have learned that it’s best to pick a method of cable wind­ing that floats your boat, and zip tie the hell out of it.  As it hap­pens, a cable’s mem­o­ry can be mod­i­fied, but only force­ful­ly.  This mem­o­ry mod­i­fi­ca­tion will become a nec­es­sary way of life if you are going to jam all of those cords into your allot­ted space from step 1.

My enter­tain­ment sys­tem’s fine ass

4.  If you have any amount of tech in your home, you will like­ly notice that there are a few major ter­mi­nals where your beloved receiv­er or router begins to resem­ble a cthul­hu.  At first, it may seem as though there is no rhyme or rea­son, and cre­at­ing order out of the chaos is sim­ply not pos­si­ble.  But fear not, for the ded­i­cat­ed Cable Wran­gler this should be a sim­ple exer­cise of pick­ing a few divi­sion points and coerc­ing those cables into groups.

For exam­ple, with my tech, I noticed that on each major piece of equip­ment, the cable ter­mi­nals were typ­i­cal­ly divid­ed by side.  It was easy enough for me to pull all the cables on each side togeth­er and zip tie them.  Not only does this save your ass when you need to under­stand how some­thing is wired, but it looks absolute­ly delight­ful from the rear — and when your enter­tain­ment unit is a free-stand­ing pass through in the mid­dle of the room, you want it to have a very fine rear indeed.

Imag­ine the red as a lit­tle road map for all the cable-based sig­nals run­ning through the space

5.  Now friends, I am about to say some­thing that would seem to go against the very fiber of what Every­day Mod­ern is all about – no, you have not acci­den­tal­ly clicked over to Hoard­ers-R-Us, so please, do not adjust your dials.  To what absur­di­ty am I refer­ring? This lit­tle gem: always buy more cable than you need.  Yes, that’s right, buy more of some­thing than you think nec­es­sary – you heard it here on Every­day Modern.

The secret of your home appear­ing at it’s most cable-less glo­ry will like­ly be the result of buy­ing way more cable than you need so that you can run the damn things around the most cir­cuitous­ly secret cours­es nec­es­sary to make sure they are out of sight and out of mind.  For instance, in my apart­ment, to get cables to the rear sur­round speak­ers that are a whop­ping 10 feet from the receiv­er, I need­ed a good 70 feet of speak­er wire.  That’s right, I ran the cables around near­ly the entire perime­ter of the apart­ment to get them to their final des­ti­na­tion.  And guess what?  You can only see about 2 feet of cable between the two of them!

Now you see the unsight­ly speak­er cables, but with a mere flick of the cur­tains, you don’t!

6.  As many of you know, my per­son­al belief is that “stuff” is some­thing one should strive to elim­i­nate from their home.  How­ev­er, there are a few times when it can come in handy.  Cable wran­gling is one of those times.  Obvi­ous­ly if you have your com­put­er inte­grat­ed to your receiver/TV, and sur­round sound, there are going to be a cer­tain amount of wires that just go with the pack­age – even if you buy as many wire­less gad­gets as you can.  The trick of cable man­age­ment is not to try to elim­i­nate cables, but find sneaky ways to hide the cables that are required.

One of my favorite tricks for hid­ing cables is to run them under the base­board.  This may seem like a one cable won­der, but you would be sur­prised.  I have found that in sev­er­al of my dwellings, the dry­wall does not go all the way to the floor, allow­ing a nice lit­tle niche for cables right behind the base­board.  All you have to do to access this holy grail of unclaimed cable space is shove cords under there with a Philips-head screw driver.

Anoth­er trick I like to use is to make my “stuff” work for me, and run cables under­neath fur­ni­ture, behind cur­tains or cab­i­nets, and attached to the sides of the book­cas­es.  These are the items that are mov­able in your home, and enable you to snake cords all over the place by sim­ple lift­ing up a chair, or adding a few zip-ties here and there.  The “stuff” is going to be there any­way, so you might as well take advan­tage of its abil­i­ty to hide some­thing, and give your home a more min­i­mal­ist clut­ter free look along the way.

Just say no to adhe­sive cable guides

7.  You may not be aware of it, but a huge debate has been under­way here at the Every­day-Mod­ern world head­quar­ters.  Said debate: is it bet­ter to sta­ple or use those nifty cable guides?  At first glance, this may seem like a no-brain­er.  I cer­tain­ly thought so when wiring my last apart­ment.  For $5 you can buy a nice white plas­tic tube that attach­es to your wall with adhe­sive back­ing, and run cables down the wall or across the ceil­ing with the stealth of a trained CIA oper­a­tive, and leave no holes in the wall?  BAM! No argu­ment there.

How­ev­er, when it came time to re-arrange, add anoth­er piece of tech, or move out, I dis­cov­ered the huge shit­ty total­ly-not-worth-it pain-in-the-ass part of these seem­ing­ly handy guides.  The adhe­sive is strong as a moth­er.  I peeled off the first lay­er of dry­wall all over that apart­ment.  What start­ed out as a benign way to man­age cords turned into a hor­rif­ic assign­ment in dry­wall and paint repair, all. over. the. place.

Need­less to say, now I have revert­ed back to the old stand­by: 3/8” sta­ples every foot or so.  It’s a lit­tle ghet­to fab­u­lous to be sure, but hav­ing a few tiny holes here and there from sta­ples are much pre­ferred to re-dry­walling the entire apart­ment.  Enough said.

If you’re still with me, con­grat­u­la­tions on fin­ish­ing the world’s longest blog post — your mer­it earns you an offi­cial entry to the Everyday-Modern.com Read­er Appre­ci­a­tion $1 Mil­lion Dol­lar Sweep­stakes!  But seri­ous­ly, that’s every­thing I have for this week, so stay tuned next week for the long await­ed tour of the new digs.  I have had a few pret­ty epic projects that I just can’t wait to post, not to men­tion, a new bun­dle of joy that’s on the way — more about that lat­er.  As always, thanks for read­ing – please feel free to share, just please give me cred­it for my work when you do.