Tip 03// Disguising cables
There’s one thing that comes with Mr. Debtist’s love for techy things that I absolutely have difficulty embracing. Cables. A motley crew of them, tangled, multi-colored, snaky things making their way into our rental properties, and now, into our home. I remember the first day I stepped into the boys’ house back when we were all in undergrad, young and carefree. You could say that their cables were of the same nature, a mangled mess, running from the downstairs to the upstairs and in between bedrooms. Even after grad school, their first house that they shared together as working men involved a number of wires and Wi-Fi receptors thrown onto the walls and ceilings, framing doorways, finding their way into boyish loves: computers, TVs, consoles, etc. Complain as I might, there is just no separating my darling husband from his love for video games and reddit, just like there is no separating me from my books. He deals with my books, so I will have to deal with his cables.
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Off course, dealing with the cables can insinuate a whole slew of solutions. The most aesthetic also being the most expensive. Ideally, we would wire the cables within the walls, so that they can snake around, unseen to guests and residents alike. Unfortunately, that would require a permanent solution to the living room, which I am not ready to commit to. We are still living with the hand-me-down couch from my college roommate, a couch that has been in my life for five years. It isn’t perfect, but we are all about making do for now, while we tackle the student debt. But you know how it is. Without the perfect couch, I won’t know the orientation of the room, which means I won’t know which wall the projector will face, which means we don’t know where the speakers will go, et cetera. So the more permanent and ideal solution will have to wait.
I have also considered buying some of those cable covers. The boxy kind that houses pesky wires and run along baseboards, better disguised. We actually had such a thing at our rental, which wasn’t so bad. However, I did not want to buy any more said cable housing knowing the solution is temporary and that it would require creating more plastic waste, not to mention spending.
So along the lines of our daily mantra, “make do with what you’ve got”, I grabbed a stapler and left-over paint from the can sitting in the closet underneath the stairs. I took the wires and stapled them in horizontal tracks along the baseboards, trying to make their way as neatly as possible from the audio box to the projector. I then painted over them in white, LA apartment style. I took a step back, and admired my work.
It’s been about two weeks since I’ve done this project. To be frank, I have forgotten about the wires. It isn’t so much that they’re disguised completely. They’re only slightly less horrid than before. But there are more important things than worrying about how wiring looks against your baseboards. No one has commented on them, which means no one is really looking at them. Or if they are looking, maybe they approve of the city-style chic my painting over them has tried to mimic. Maybe it feels a bit more New York, emitting the older loft-like vibes of a more mature taste. We look on the bright side of things around here, always.
