Here's a closer picture of the left side, where the cords for the lamp and the antenna hang over the side of the bookcase.
In the middle section, here's a not-great pic of the hole behind the TV.
And then on the right side, here you can see how many cords are trying to fit through the cabinet door.
Messy, messy, messy. Not really knowing how to fix it, I thought I'd just try something. I borrowed my Dad's drill, measured to the center of the left side, and just starting drilling. Here's a picture of where it started, with the two holes I had sketched to assess how big the hole needed to be to fit the cords through it.
And then I just started drilling holes. With just a regular-sized bit. Seriously. Clearly I didn't think this through very well ahead of time, because what I ended up doing was just drilling a bunch of holes next to each other, hoping to make them become one bigger hole. I know, this seems idiotic, but I don't have a better explanation for my thought process. Lesson learned: fail to plan, plan to fail. I wish I had thought to take a picture of what the disaster looked like, but basically it was just a super-lumpy, ugly hole.
Whenever I have a failure of some sort, Pat Smith is generally my first call. As usual, Pat had the answer. Something called a hole saw or a hole bit - who knew that such magical things, specifically designed for this very purpose, existed?!??!? Clearly, not me. But how cool! They just attach right to the end of the drill, and create a really nice clean hole. Pat had a couple of bits himself, but they were not quite the right size - too big or too small. So I measured the size of the cords I needed to deal with, and it looked like a 1 1/4" diameter was the size that would work, and I picked one up at the store for about $8.
I tried the bit first on the right-hand third of the bookcase, where no holes had been drilled yet. It was super smooth and easy, and here's how nice that hole came out:
And here's a shot from farther away so you can see it in context. Still pretty small and unobtrusive...
...but even better when covered by a lamp!
Buoyed by this first success, I moved on to the left-hand side of the bookcase, where my lumpy disaster hole was. Unfortunately, this one was harder to drill. Because there was already a hole there, that left nothing for the bit to grab on to, so it slid around a lot. It got done, but here was the result.
The middle hole had the same problem. Luckily, they were easily covered over with some spackle and paint so they cleaned up nicely. It's not 100% perfect, but the whole idea is for the holes to be basically invisible, so it works just fine. The final result was well worth the wait!
See how nice and clean that looks? As compared to this?
Here's some close-ups on each side. On the left I was able to get rid of the lamp cord, but couldn't solve the antenna cord, since it has a huge chunk on the end that there's no way I'm drilling a hole big enough for. Maybe someday I'll brainstorm a solution for this, but it's still an improvement.
On the right, I was able to get rid of the lamp cord, the DVD cord, and the TV cord (which now fits in the hole directly behind the TV).
You can still see that one white cord poking out of the bottom, for my laptop, which plugs into the power strip located in the bottom right cabinet. I can always put it fully away when I have company over, or when I'm not using my laptop, but even with it plugged in I can now shut the cabinet door like 95% of the way, which is a huge improvement!
This has been bugging me for 3 years, and it's FINALLY fixed! Life is good.
No comments:
Post a Comment