The Problem: My desk is a mess, and, if you are anywhere near
normal, so is yours. It’s not the coffee cups and papers that bother
me, though, but the tangle of cables hanging down the back and trailing
across the floor, twisting like Tarzan vines in a particularly fertile
rain forest.
This weekend, I decided to do something about it. There are plenty
of tutorials on the web detailing intricate schemes for cable
management, most of which involve drilling holes, installing wooden
screens or other long-winded solutions. I’m lazy, and I’m also fussy
about how things look, so I thought about the easiest (and cheapest)
fix I could make. Read on to find out how, with some street scavenging
and five minutes of easy work you can have a neat and tidy workspace.
The Solution: In Barcelona, my home town, these plastic crates can be found everywhere thanks to a healthy lack of respect for the supermarket — regular shops and real markets rule, and so these useful containers abound. They can be cut down to be used as in-shower shelves or fixed to bike racks to carry shopping. They can be stacked in cupboards and upturned for use as impromptu seating. And they can be used to fix my mess o’ cables.
I found this one almost as soon as I had decided to do this project and, double-lucky, it fit right in between the legs of the folding table. This means that it met my criterion of being easy. Check how snug it is:
Next, to decide how to fix the crate to the table. As the crate has plenty of holes, cooling won’t be an issue and the whole thing can be snugly pushed against the bottom of the desktop. The problem there, though, is that those handy gaps front and back aren’t quite big enough for easy access. I figured I could either get fancy and install some kind of hinge to swing it down, but that would quite obviously be too much effort. So I checked to see if there would be legroom if the casket was mounted on a permanent slant:
Here it is slotted in underneath. As you can see, swinging it down a little won’t significantly restrict what little legroom this desk already has. So, having decided that I could fix it in place, it was time to choose the manner of attachment. Cable ties!
The ties weren’t quite long enough to reach, so I just doubled them up:
Then, it was a matter of threading them through a nearby gap. This shows the second advantage of the plastic crate: lots of holes means lots of mounting points. And because it is lightweight, you only need a few ties to hold both crate and power strips.
Easy, and – if it weren’t for taking all the photos – a ten minute job. The hard part was in finding the right sized crate and there I got lucky. The finished piece:
Now, right there it looks pretty conspicuous but, when returned to its home with the crate-side to the wall it will be a lot less visible. You obviously don’t have to use a crate — a cardboard box would do (along with some air holes if you plan to put any hard drives in there).
As you can see from the picture, though, the crate is ideal: It is easily attached, it has a nice big gap at the back for throwing in new hardware and it has plenty of holes from which to run those cables to the computer above. Heck, with the ventilation I could even throw the Gadget Lab Hackintosh netbook in there, hook up a monitor and use it as a permanent desktop machine.
Next up: Actually tidying the cables away — a rather formidable task. Take a look at the mess I have to deal with after pulling the table out of the room:
Over to y’all. Anyone got a neat and tidy desk hack? Post in the comments here, or add your photos to the Gadget Lab Flickr Group.
