Guest post: Hiding cords

Today I have a very special post for you! It´s been written by a good friend of mine, Petra Erlandson. She is here today to share a unique way to hide ugly cords.

Hello JADE by Jenni readers!  I am so excited to be able to write this guest post.  I have never written a blog post before and very honored to have had my friend invite me to do it.

My name is Petra and I live in Southern California in the United States.  Wait… you might be asking yourself how do I know Jenni who lives in Finland?  The answer is because of Jackie Hernandez and the community she created called School of Decorating.  If you are not familiar with Jackie, please visit her blog Teal and Lime and the School of Decorating of which both Jenni and I are members.  It is amazing that we have struck a long distance friendship along with many other woman around the globe!

The project I want to share with you is the very easy and inexpensive way that I hide cords in our living room.  I think the issue of ugly black electrical cords is troublesome to many people.  Everything seems to have a cord and all of the cords are ugly!  Ugly cords are everywhere from the living room with TV, DVD, cable… to office’s with computer, printer, hard drive… perhaps even in the kitchen or bedroom with phone chargers, etc!

In our living room we have very nice built in shelving around the fireplace with our TV above and various components below in a cabinet to the right.  This shelving system was probably built and installed 15 years ago by a prior owner of our home.  At the time, they routed all of the cords carefully behind the cabinets and through to the back of the TV.  The problem is that all of those cords are very old style and certainly not the HDMI cables we need.  We tried to pull through our new wires but it did not work at all so we must route the cords in front where they can be seen.  Big black cords against the white shelving are very ugly!

My solution is to wrap the cords in a white fabric that matches the background area.  The first step is to use some zip-ties to bind the four cords together.  If you do not have zip-ties, you could probably use twist-ties or even black electrical tape.  One tip is to bundle the wires tightly for most of the length, but then if your cords will go into a cabinet like mine you should line them up side by side to make a more flat profile where they will enter the cabinet as it will take up less space and the cabinet door will close better.

At this point in the project, I was wondering what white fabric I might have extra to wrap with…  Then I remembered I had some old cotton undershirt T-shirts from my husband that I was planning to cut up to use for rags!  Instead, I cut the shirts into long strips about 2 inches (5 cm) wide winding around and around the base of the T-shirt from bottom to top.  Using undershirts might be a little unconventional but they were clean, free and worked great so I do not argue with those facts!  I wrapped the bundle of cords with these long T-shirt strips.  Once wrapped, I used some 3M Command Strips to secure the wrapped cords to the wall with a little yarn.  Hopefully the photos do a good job of explaining this.

Now the cords are much better disguised!

I hope you will find this idea useful and perhaps do something similar to rid your home of ugly cords! Thank you for reading!

Thanks Petra for visiting and sharing your ideas with us! What an inspirational way to hide cords! I welcome you back anytime :)

I live in Southern California with my husband and 6 year old son.  We purchased our home a year and a half ago which began my interest into home decor so that I could make our home a warm and inviting place for our family and friends.  I believe that your home should be a reflection of you and your values - a place where you are safe to be yourself.  I call my design style "Honest Charm" because I like straightforward design with clean lined furniture combined with plenty of happy pops of color.