Almost everything we use these days is powered by electricity, and that often leads to cords trailing all over the room, crossing over each other, and generally looking a mess. This is both frustrating and dangerous, so what can you do to avoid it?
There are quite a few ways to cover up electrical cords in the middle of the room, including adding rugs, using wire covers, or moving furniture into a suitable space. Sometimes, power strips will help you to hide them, or you may be able to tuck them into a box or a basket so they are out of sight.
Ways to Hide Electrical Cords in the Middle of the Room:
- Use Your Furniture
- Use Baskets or Boxes
- Use Trunking
- Use Cord Protectors
- Add Faux Books
- Get a Cable Management Box
- Utilize Your Baseboards
- Try Cable Clips
- Put Up Some Hooks
- Run Them Along the Walls
- Add Power Strips
- Purchase Some Rugs
- Create a Charging Station
- Use Them to Decorate
We’re going to use this article to explore the top methods for hiding your electrical cords. We’ll also look at the best ways to make them tidy when they can’t be hidden, and cover some tips for using them as decorations instead.
Tip 1: Use Your Furniture
Furniture is one of the best ways to deal with cords running across your room. You can use the furniture to cover the cords up, which hides them and makes them safer. Nobody can trip over a cord if it’s underneath your couch or your coffee table.
This is particularly good for any cords that have to run across the room, as these are the most obtrusive and the biggest trip hazards. Place your furniture strategically so that it will cover them up, and you’ll find your living room looks much tidier.
Remember that you can run multiple cords under one piece of furniture, and furniture with a low base will work better for this. A table may not hide cords as well as a couch, but either can help.
If possible, you may want to attach the cord to the piece of furniture, so that it follows the line of the furniture – this will hide it as effectively as possible. Use masking tape or another gentle tape to stick it in place without damaging your furniture.
Tip 2: Use Baskets or Boxes
Sometimes, you won’t be able to use a piece of furniture to hide cables, and in these cases, a basket or a box might be the ideal solution. Simply bore a hole in the side that’s large enough for the plug to pass through, and then slot the cable into it and store your item neatly out of sight.
If you need to hide a long wire, you could coil it up inside the basket or the box.
You can also pass the cable out the other side of the box simply by boring another hole, and running it through. This will help you to hide any excess cable, while still letting you place the electrical item in the desired position. Put the lid on the basket or the box, and you’ve got the perfect setup.
The great thing about this is you can easily move the basket or box when you need to relocate the cable, or use it for another cable later. You can also decorate it to match your room and make it as unobtrusive as possible.
Tip 3: Use Trunking
If you’ve got multiple wires running in any direction, trunking can be an excellent solution for pulling them together and hiding them. Trunking prevents you from ending up with a whole pile of cables looping over and under each other, and makes them look more deliberate.
One of the things that makes cables look messy is their waviness, but trunking is straight and looks much neater. It also shows that the cable is a permanent fixture, which tends to make it “feel” tidier even if it doesn’t look very different.
Furthermore, you can’t get your foot caught in a cable that has been fixed down with trunking, so this will make it safer. Try to run trunking along the edge of furniture or a wall if possible, as this will look far neater than fixing it across the room.
Tip 4: Use Cord Protectors
If trunking isn’t suitable because the wires do need to run across the center of the room, you can try using flexible cord protectors. These won’t pin the wire down, but will hold multiple cables together, and should stop the cords from getting frayed or damaged as people walk on them.
Cord protectors also come in multiple colors, so you may be able to find something that suits your decorations and blends into your room. For example, if you have a white carpet, a white cord protector will make black cables far less obtrusive.
Tip 5: Add Faux Books
In some cases, you might have a coffee table that you can pass the wires under, but they may still show if it’s too open. At other times, there may be a shelf you can run them along, but they’re still visible. A solution to this can be fake books.
These will look great in any room, and you can bore a hole through anywhere you need to let the cords pass through. If you’ve got a lot of cables to hide, this can be a particularly effective option.
You can make fake books by purchasing some old books from a thrift shop and gluing them together. Next, cut off the back half of your book stack so that it only takes up half of the shelf’s width, leaving space for the cables.
The cables can then be tucked behind the books, out of sight and out of harm’s way. If you need to access them, simply lift the stack of fake books down, and you’ll be able to get at the cables. Choose a few nice books that match your decor, or opt for the shabby, chic look, and you’ll soon love the display that holds your electrical cords.
You can do this with other decorations if you prefer, but books present a uniform line and look great in pretty much any room of the house, so they’re the top choice. Other ornaments may work, but it’s harder to completely block out the view of the cable.
Tip 6: Get a Cable Management Box
This is similar to using a basket or a box, but it involves buying a box specifically designed to hold the cables in place. These boxes will have holes already, and usually have enough room for multiple cords. They may also have room for a power strip, so you can hide the sockets, as well as any excess cable.
They can be purchased in various colors, and they are a very simple way to tidy up and disguise messy cords, making your room look far more attractive. If you’re tidying up around a computer desk, for example, installing one of these will immediately make the space feel more organized, tucking those unsightly cables out of the way.
If you don’t want to purchase a box, you can just make one yourself, but a commercial one will likely be sturdier and the right size for a power strip, plus excess cables. It’s well worth considering these boxes.
Tip 7: Utilize Your Baseboards
If you’re really dedicated to cable management or if you’re redecorating a room anyway, your baseboards can be a fantastic way to hide your electrical cords. After all, they run around the room, so they can take a cable anywhere it needs to go, at least against the walls.
Anyone who is reasonably good at DIY can pry off the baseboards, hollow out a space behind them and slot the cords into the space. Once this is done, the baseboard can be fixed back into place, with the cables tucked out of sight. Bore a hole through wherever the cable needs to exit the wall and run into the room.
This is a great solution if you aren’t planning to move the cable for a long time. Cables that need to be moved more frequently shouldn’t be run behind the baseboards, because you don’t want to be removing them every time you want to swap the cable’s position, but for permanent cords, this is one of the best ways to get them out of sight.
Tip 8: Try Cable Clips
Sometimes, just making the cable look tidy is enough to deal with it, and cable clips can be a great solution here.
You can buy various kinds, and many have an adhesive backing so you can stick them to the nearest surface. This holds the cable flat, which makes it look much tidier, and keeps it out of the way. You’ll nicely reduce the trip hazard at the same time.
Try running your cable clips up the legs of furniture or along the bases to give yourself a neat line to follow. This will hide most of the cord, and make the parts you can see less obtrusive.
Cable clips come in many different styles, which makes it much easier to find something that will suit your home. You can get round ones that the cables push into, wire ones that clasp around the cable, or ones with a little pin and a plastic holder – simply nail the pin into place and the holder will grip the wire nicely.
Cable clips are appealing because they are one of the easiest ways to get your cables tidied up, and they can be installed on almost any surface. Unlike some of the other solutions, they don’t involve moving furniture around, and they are an extremely cheap solution that you can use pretty much anywhere.
You should make sure that the adhesive won’t mark whatever you’re sticking it to, particularly if it’s a valuable piece of furniture. Be aware that it could tear wallpaper or peel off paint, and avoid using adhesive cable clips on things you care about.
Tip 9: Put Up Some Hooks
Sometimes, you’ll need hooks to keep your wires in place. Hooks can be screwed to the undersides of coffee tables, the edges of door frames, or the sides of desks, and they will help to gather electrical cords together and keep them tidy. They can be used to hold the cords close to the underside of a surface, where they will be less visible.
For example, if you run the electrical cords under your coffee table, they may still be fairly easy to see, especially if they are resting on the floor and the table has a high surface. If you screw some hooks into the bottom of the coffee table and loop the cords over these hooks, they will be much better hidden.
Tip 10: Run Them Along the Walls
Where possible, it’s always best to follow the line of a wall with your cables. This will help to keep them out of the way, reduce the tripping hazard, and make them look better because they’ll be following a neat line.
In some cases, you’ll be able to simply tuck an electrical cord along the edge of your carpet or floor, and it will stay neatly out of the way. At other times, you’ll need to use one of the tricks mentioned above to hold the cord in place. Trunking, cable clips, and tape can all fix a cable out of harm’s way.
Tip 11: Add Power Strips
If you’ve got cables running all over the room in many directions, a power strip can make a big difference in terms of your cable organization. It will help you ensure all your cables come from the same source, and this will allow you to make better use of things like cable management boxes, cable clips, and faux books.
A power strip can then be tucked out of sight under the lip of a table or fixed along one leg using zip ties to hold it in place. All the cables will be neatly contained in one area, which often makes them easier to handle. You may still need to employ other solutions to deal with the individual cables, but the power strip should make things tidier and easier.
Tip 12: Purchase Some Rugs
Rugs are an excellent way to hide cords that absolutely must run into the center of the room. For example, if you’ve got a lamp plugged in by your couch, you’ll need the cord to cross the floor, and that can look unsightly, especially in an otherwise tidy living room. You might want to hide this by adding a rug.
Rugs will neatly disguise cords because you can simply run the cord underneath the rug, hiding it completely. This can also reduce the risk of somebody tripping over the cord, although you need to make sure the rug is as flat as possible so that it doesn’t become a trip hazard itself. A thick rug is generally better for hiding cords than a thin one.
Tip 13: Create a Charging Station
If your cables are all associated with charging different devices, you could create one single charging station for the whole room, and this is an effective way to make things tidier. For small items that need charging, you could put everything into one box, including the device and the power strip.
For example, if you’ve got a phone, a camera, a toothbrush, a portable battery, or other similar items that need charging, tucking them all into one box out of sight and letting them charge there is ideal. It’s amazing what a difference having a charging station can make to a room, especially somewhere with multiple devices that you need to charge.
Tip 14: Use Them to Decorate
Electrical cords certainly aren’t the first thing that most people think of when they decorate, but you might be amazed at how you can incorporate your electrical cords into your aesthetic. On their own, cables are ugly, but if you spice them up a bit, you can hide them in plain sight.
For example, you could wrap the cables in ribbons, or twine Christmas lights around them. Add stickers, or twist fake flowers and fake leaves along them. Essentially, get as creative as you like and turn the cords into a feature, rather than something to hide.
This won’t significantly reduce the risk of you tripping on them, but it may make them more visible. It will certainly help to make them less obtrusive. Try to think about how the cable is positioned, as well as how it is decorated, to make it look as good as possible.
If you really can’t cover up a cable easily, this is likely the best solution – hide it in plain sight by making it an attractive feature of the room. It shouldn’t take long, and it can be a fun way to flex your creativity and challenge yourself.
Final Thoughts
Hiding electrical cords can be tricky, but it’s very possible if you are creative and you think carefully about your space. Assess whether rugs are a good option, or whether moving furniture around is more viable. Use cable clips to make your electrical cords conform to surfaces in the room, and power strips to bring all the cords together.
When all else fails, get decorative!
