Who doesn't love spaghetti? Well, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I don't love spaghetti. Sometimes I just pretend like it's not there. I'll try to squish all my spaghetti under a piece of furniture and act like it doesn't stink. The thought of facing that spaghetti and trying to make something with it is overwhelming when it's just easier to ignore it.

I'm speaking, of course, of the black spaghetti-like mess of cables that can be found behind any computer, stereo system, or other piece of electronics. I'd venture to say that almost everyone reading this has, at one point, had a tangle of cords hidden behind some furniture. Most of us still do. Ft. Wayne's 2.0 makeover family the Royers does, I do, Jim 2.0 does - and there's no shame in it!

Spaghetti at the Royers' house

Guru Alison offers some excellent tips on how to tame your tangles with style. Those specialized desks that unravel cords so that you don't have to are truly marvels. She also suggests zip ties, wire baskets, and even wireless keyboards and mice. All excellent suggestions!

We use a couple of different cable taming techniques around my house. For cables that are all about the same length and come and go to the same places (like from a computer monitor to the back of a computer), we'll use a long, flexible tube that wraps around the cables and turns a mess of many strands into one tidy hose.

For situations where we have many cables going many different places, like behind the entertainment center, we'll sometimes use zip ties, but they aren't very easy to reposition on the fly. One product that comes in handy are color-coded Velcro strips. Tie red ones around the DVD player wires, blue ones around the gaming system wires, and so on. Then, if you want to move one of your components, you can tell at a glance which wires belong to it.

On a side note, I highly recommend letting your kids help when you're putting together a computer or stereo system and showing them how the wires plug in from piece to piece. They may not get it right at first, but it's a good introduction to how things work. And if you're organizing your cords while you're installing, it gives kids a good example for the day when they'll be facing their own cord nightmare.

But still, I get the feeling that we're not doing the best we can around here to tame our cable spaghetti. I'm really interested to hear what you guys do to keep the cord-monster at bay. What has worked, and what's failed miserably? Does anyone have a solution that will actually let you run a vacuum cleaner behind a computer? Do you know of anything you can recycle for cable organization without having to go out and buy special equipment? Shout it out in the comments below!

And for some reason, I'm craving spaghetti for supper. The kind with meatballs.

Posted by Dee | tagged: Royer, clutter