How to Hide Electronics on a Mantel
Reader Question: Just showed my husband your fireplace and said I HAVE to do this…just found a mantle on craigslist for $100 too! My question is…my hubby has to keep his mammoth tv too…what did you do to hide the cords? I can’t see the playstation which is awesome!!
Reader Question: You and your home are lovely. I was curious about the placement of your tv and if you have cable service. If so, where is the box located? My husband has wanted our tv on our mantle for many years, but wires, where to put the cable box, and just plain fear of it looking out of place scare me. Do you have any suggestions?
So…this question ends up in my inbox pretty frequently. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has a husband who loves a ginormous TV. (HA!) But then there’s the problem: How do I keep our living room from looking like a frat pad?
In our house, there was really no place to put our TV other than right over our faux fireplace. And I love my Gilmore Girls Netflix marathons just as much as any other girl. Rory and I…we’re tight ya know.
After we first built our faux fireplace, it looked like this:
Speakers, cords, Playstation, Bluray player, digital antenna… all of it. We are one of the few who actually don’t have cable or satelite. It’s one of the ways we decided to cut down on our monthly expenses when we switched to a one income household. All of the other electronic mess is there though. Blech!
But the solution was so easy! (Affiliate links are provided for convenience. For more info, see my full disclosure here.)
Supplies for how to hide electronics on a mantel:
- CordMate Kit
- Leafy garland (I used this one.)
- A pair of lanterns or something with a little height (I have these from Kirkland’s.)
That’s it!
We just cut the length of the CordMate molding we needed for the amount of exposed cords we had, popped the cord inside of it, and stuck it to our wall under the TV. It took all of 5 minutes and it just looks like white trim.
And yep…that’s definitely dust on our Playstation. Aren’t you so glad I cleaned up for you to tour our mantel? Wink.
If you have an outlet on the other side of the room, you can even run the molding around the room along your baseboard. Thankfully, our outlet is behind our firebox door and we only have to run our cords straight down through a hole in the top of our mantel.
To hide our electronics, we were really limited because the boxes still needed to breathe and we couldn’t have anything solid blocking the receivers from the remotes. So my quickie solution was magnolia garland that I picked up at Michaels one day. I just lay it in front of the boxes and lift it up to put in a DVD if I need to. Maybe it’s not the perfect fix, but it works.
We had thought about moving the boxes into a glass cabinet beside our fireplace, but we really didn’t want another piece of furniture to contend with.
So for now, our electronics can still receive a signal from our remotes through the garland leaves.
Another more permanent solution we might be trying soon is setting up an infrared remote kit. You can hide all of your boxes in a closet somewhere and be done! Whoever invented that deserves a giant lollipop or something. Have you tried it before? I’d love to know if you like it!
We still had those little speakers to deal with, and I didn’t want anything too tall to obstruct the view of the TV (#moviebuffprobs), so a pair of lanterns did the job. I can change them out with the seasons and fill them with different things like pine cones in the fall or little boxwoods in the summer.
Last year at Christmas, I did something really similar with evergreen garland and lights to disguise all of the madness too.
Do you have the TV/cord/electronics mayhem happening in your living room right now? Or a brilliant solution for containing the not-so-pretty stuff? Or a hubby who would rather cut off his arm than part with his big screen TV? I’m totally kidding. Maybe only a toe. 😉
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