Installing a new TV can be difficult, and hiding wires after the fact usually seems like overkill. But disposing of these cables in a stylish and thoughtful way is sure to elevate any space and keep it from feeling like an early 2000s home office. After all, you love your flat screen TV for its slim lines that allow the design of the room to take center stage, and unruly TV cords only detract from that.

Learn 13 great options for hiding TV wires without the hassle.

Ways to hide TV wires

Group yourself into a flexible cable manager with a zipper

All the wires become one easily solved problem when you plug them into a flexible woven control cable. These knitted sleeves fit up to seven strings and keep them compact and tidy.

Available in several colors that blend in with the wall or disappear in the dark, the zippered cable outlets are about two meters long each, but can be stacked, one after the other, as long as you like.

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Store in a cable management box

The electrical outlet on the floor is the source of so many visual problems, as multiple power cords lead from it. It’s a traffic jam that attracts cobwebs and debris like a magnet.

Made of tough ABS plastic, the cable management box neatly hides the distribution and excess wires in a container that looks like it absolutely belongs there. Typical colors are off-white, white, black, wood tones and more; some can even be painted. Side cable ports can be opened or closed as needed. Most boxes have air vents or slits to allow for discreet ventilation.

Package with DIY cable ties

A little goes a long way with cable ties. If you’re not ready for more robust wire hiding solutions, individual cable ties spaced every meter or so wrestle the dense mass of wires into a thinner bundle.

You don’t even need special cable ties, just buy a roll of 3/4 inch wide black hook and loop tape and cut as much as you need. A 10-foot roll for less than $15 is enough to connect as many TV wires as you need.

Replace with shorter wires

Excessively long TV cords snaking around the floor can be difficult to minimize – even with cable management boxes and ties. The solution is to replace the long wires with shorter wires.

Power, HDMI, coaxial, and data cables come in a variety of lengths—some as short as a foot. Bare tip speaker wire can be hand cut and stripped to length.

Move the socket sideways towards the TV

The best way to hide the TV’s power cord is to locate the TV directly in front of the outlet. When you can’t bring the TV to the outlet, bring the outlet to the TV. When expanding the outlet laterally, holes must be made between the screws to be patched later with drywall, tape, and paint.

For hiding TV wires, it’s to your advantage that the National Electrical Code requires that no wall space be more than 6 feet from an outlet (or an outlet no more than 12 feet away). This means that the outlet closest to the intended location of the TV can be extended up to another 6 feet – short work for any licensed electrician.

Hide in wall passages and ducts

Wires for wall mounted TVs have quite a distance to travel upwards and still remain invisible. Depending on the size of your TV and the mounting height you want, that distance can be anywhere from 10 to 31 inches (based on a 12-inch socket height). Wall tracks and channels come to the rescue for this problem.

Tracks and ducts are straight or D-shaped pipes that run along the surface of a wall to hide TV wires. Typically, the back strip is screwed into the drywall using dowels or self-adhesive sticks. After you thread the cords, the trim panel snaps into place over the back. They are made of plastic in neutral colors that camouflage the wall, and most can be painted in the color of the wall.

Move them directly up

If you’re lucky enough to have a TV that sits right above the outlet, it’s easy to move the outlet higher. This is because the TV wires can travel between the two pegs – there is no need to drill screw holes to keep the wire horizontal.

It also helps that an old or retrofitted plastic electrical box allows you to install that taller outlet in the drywall without having to nail it.

Best of all, no drywall patching is required. It is easy to fish the wire vertically through the open peg holes. The bottom outlet can remain in place, supplying power to other devices.

Pass through the quarter-circle channel of the base plate

Raceways and channels move the TV wires along the wall vertically. But what about moving them a few feet horizontally? A clever, hard-to-detect device is a replacement channel for the quarter circuit of the motherboard.

Many homes already have a type of long, narrow frame called a quarter-round. Nothing to do with the wiring. It is a piece of solid wood or PVC that hides the gaps between the wallboard and the floor.

Hollow plastic quarter replacements allow you to run two or three wires laterally along the wall. With a top that snaps into an attached back, these quarter-circle ducts are easy to open and close when you need to change wiring.

Run Behind Crown or Wall Trim

The crown bridges the angle between the walls and the ceiling and provides a large space for running TV wires around the room. For thin speaker wires that need to run vertically on the wall, the back of the door trim often has a shallow channel large enough for the wire.

Molding is difficult to cleanly remove and replace. But you may be able to fish out the flat parts of the existing crown molding with metal electrician’s tape. For this you will need to remove part of the crown at the end to access the space.

Hide behind the wall

Keep the wires completely out of sight by hiding them inside the wall. Drilling holes and twisting power cables and wires is a known fire hazard that violates the National Fire Code, but a built-in power kit can be used to stay in code compliance. In this way, the wires are safely stored behind the wall, and the cables will not get tangled or damaged by hanging freely.

Hide in a fake wall

A little more than two-by-fours, drywall, drywall screws, and trim are needed to build a false, non-load-bearing wall. The false wall can be attached to the wall behind it. Or you can move the false wall forward and attach it to the ceiling and floor.

With either version, adding trim to the junction between false wall and ceiling, floor and adjacent walls saves you the considerable work of adding drywall compound and sanding corners with drywall tape.

Hide them in plain sight

Get creative and make TV wires and cables part of your home design. For wires that need to run horizontally along the floor, make them part of your stand or tuck them into a piece of furniture that has built-in outlets. For wires that need to run vertically, make a makeshift post or piece of wood, depending on the aesthetic of your design.

Mount the power strip on the wall

When the extension strip rests on the floor under the TV, it looks messy and unstable. Simply moving the power cord off the floor and attaching it to the wall is a quick way to eliminate wire clutter and make everything neater.

The rear keyholes on the sockets can be difficult to detect. If you misplace the screws even a little, the tape will not mount properly. Once you learn how easy it is to install the conduit, you’ll be up and running in minutes.

1. Run painter’s tape across the entire back of the distribution strip.
2. Rub the tape with your finger to locate the two keyholes.
3. Punch a hole in each keyhole with a pencil. Be sure to drill the thin part of the keyhole, not the round part.
4. Remove the painter’s tape and apply it to the wall.
5. Drive the screws directly through the holes in the painter’s tape, then peel off the tape.

What kind of rope to hide

Ducts and surface mount conduits cannot be used to hide electrical wiring in a household. Plastic sheathed NM or metal BX electrical wiring should be installed inside walls for protection. Individual THHN wires should be installed in solid metal conduits. THHN, NM and BX wiring cannot be installed in exposed locations.

Power cables that are hard-wired to televisions and other electronic devices can generally be installed in surface-mount conduits and raceways. Always check the device’s safety instructions before doing so.

Ethernet cables, data cables, speaker wires, coaxial, HDMI, and other wires that carry low or no voltage can be routed through ducts and ducts or left exposed.