I Whip My Tail Back and Fourth

We totally need some help here. By 'here' I mean with our tv/fireplace situation. Take a look see and then I'll explain in greater detail what exactly is the problem.

 

If you didn't guess already the problem is that there's no where to put any of this crap. Our home was built in 1981 and the concept of hanging a TV on the wall (or above the fireplace) didn't exists back then. We have all our components stacked on a generic Ikea Lack table (yes, you read that right, GENERIC IKEA!). Why are they stacked there and not next to the fireplace you ask? Well because the cables to connect them to the tv are not long enough. You know what else isn't long enough, the cord to the power strip. I has to sit kinda in the middle. Then there's that blindingly obvious problem of the cords just spewing from the bottom of the tv. Basically we can't even use this awesome fireplace (which was the main reason we wanted this place) because of all this crap. Don't get me wrong, I love watching tv and I really like having the tv here, but we need to fix this.

 

 

Monday I set out to tidy this mess up. First I hung the front two speakers on the wall next to the fireplace. That's why they are hanging in the before picture! If forgot to take a real before picture. Then I moved that subwoofer upstairs to the loft. The wire was just long enough to reach!

 

 

I also wanted to get the center speaker up off the cable box, so I grabbed some of the left over command strips from the broach hanging project and stuck it on top of the tv. FYI, I added one more strip going the opposite direction in the middle for a little more support.

 

 

Since we don't really use the Wii I packed it up so that there were less cords to deal with. Once everything was paired down and hung up I found one of those cord management things we've had forever and wrapped it around the cables. Oh, and I wound the extra speaker wire into little bundles that are held together with electrical tape so they wouldn't be a messy little nest of wires.

 

 

Tada! It's slightly less terrible than the before picture, and it now looks like our tv has a tail. Great! We really need a mantle. And an outlet back there. Hopefully when we have an electrician come do some work on the bar we can have him run some power to the back of the tv. I would imagine that the cord will have to be on the exterior of the bricks, but anything has got to be better than this.

 

 

Do you have your tv hung on a brick fireplace? If so, please tell me what your set up looks like! Pictures would be great too. Oh, and if you noticed some of our reading material and have any question about How to Pick Up Girls, you can buy the same book here. And just to be fair, we also have How to Pick Up Men right beneath it. Classy.

 

UPDATE! I found a picture of the one and only time we've used the fireplace. Notice the placement of the components? Yeah, that's not really going to work.