My frame wall still has at least three empty frames, and an ever-yellowing piece of newspaper place-holding for a fourth. Oh the shame!
Well amazingly enough, this post isn't about mounting things on the wall. It's this situation. The two cables for my recently wall-mounted computer monitor that hang in unseemly fashion from beneath its frame, and then sprawl across my desk.
Not very attractive, right?
Right. So I decided it was high time to remedy that a little. I found this little piece of timber conduit that we clearly scavenged from elsewhere in the house...
And discovered that the two monitor cables fitted very nicely into it.
I popped it in position underneath the monitor frame, resting on the desk. Looks good!
And then I traced around the base of it to get the outline of the area it would cover up on the desk.
And then, with much trepidation, I drilled into my lovely painted desk. Aaah!
And then, like magic, I had this result!
Actually, I lie. Don't let the wonder of before and after photos fool you. It was nothing like magic. It was at least an hour and a half of me drilling through the top of the desk trying desperately not to go outside my lines or let the drill slip and damage the desk (and the wall). I wasn't entirely successful with either of those things.
But wait, there's more. It wasn't just drilling down from the top. When we prepared this desk (which used to be a dining table, that we chopped in half) to be mounted on the wall, we added this piece of timber along the back to support the desk top, which we then screwed into the wall.
That meant that my monitor cables didn't just have to make it through the 20mm desk top, they had to make it through that mass of timber beneath the desk as well. Which in turn meant that I had to gouge a hole in that timber big enough to fit them through.
After using practically every drill bit and spade bit in Tom's collection (by the way, I think they might all have been hand-me-downs from his grandfather, they couldn't have been blunter) and cursing myself for ever starting out on this ridiculous quest, I finally had this horrible-looking hole to show for my work.
Fortunately unless visitors to my office insist on enjoying it from their backs on the floor, this mess won't be visible. And it did eventually perform its role of getting the heads of each of the cables through to the top of the desk admirably.
Which unfortunately wasn't in much better condition. Before you judge my terrible drill skills, please remember that everything was blunt, and I was struggling with the angle of the drill, since I couldn't actually manage to get the monitor (or its frame) off the wall to give me a bit more manouvreability. So my poor desk is now a bit mutilated and scratched. And that damage is much more obvious that the under-desk masacre. I'll have to see what a bit of sanding and touch-up paint can do in the future.
Anyway, I decided not to dwell on my frustration on that point (a short reprieve, since now I spend all day every day gazing at it in sadness as I work) , and plugged the monitor plugs back in...
Resulting in this much neater cord situation, at least.
I then realised that my pilfered timber conduit had actually come from beneath a powerpoint on another wall of the office, so I had to return it to its proper spot, to make sure there weren't any exposed electrical wires. Thankfully I managed to find another piece that obviously hadn't come from the office, since it wasn't painted the same grey as the wall.
Clearly I need to remedy that, since the test-run I did with the grey-painted one (further above) looked a lot better, meaning there's some grey-painting in my future.
So! Despite my less-than-perfect technique and after much struggle, I finally ended up with the result I was after! Those black and grey monitor cables are now invisible. Thank goodness.
Next on the agenda? This mess of cables on the floor under the desk. In fact, this picture doesn't even come close to accurately representing the mess I've got going on down there.
No comments:
Post a Comment