In today’s world where everything needs to be powered or charged, you will likely have some cables at your desk setup.
If your desk is in the center of your room, it can be hard to hide the snake of ugly power cables going towards your desk. That can be a real eyesore.
There are a few strategies you can easily follow to avoid seeing this mess of cables. In this article, we’re going to tell you exactly how you can hide all those cables so your desk can still look clean and cable-free!
The Basics Of Hiding Desk Cables In The Middle of A Room
You have two main goals to effectively hide cables for desks centered in a room.
First, Hide Cables On Your Desk
The first goal is to cable manage your desk by plugging all your devices into a single power strip. Then hide those cables and and power strip using the methods we talk about in detail later in the article.
Then, Hide an Extension Cord As it Travels To The Wall
After you have everything hooked up to a central power strip, you are left with a single plug. Now we need to sneakily route an extension cord between your desk and an outlet.
We’ll talk about a bunch of ways to conceal this extension cord very well.
The result of these two steps is a nearly perfect cable-managed desk at the center of your room or home office. Now let’s get into the details!
Before You Begin Cable Managing
Before you start cable managing, I find it always helps to do the following steps of the planning stage first. These steps will make the rest of the cable management process much easier.
Identify The Cables You Need To Manage
First, count up all the powered devices on your desk. This will help us choose an appropriate-sized power strip with enough outlets.
This is also a good time to think about if all those powered devices are actually necessary. Remove the devices you don’t actually use. This results in fewer cables to manage in the first place which can be a huge help.
Choose The Nearest Hard-To-See Outlet
Now choose which power outlet you will use on one of your walls. This will be the outlet where we will sneakily route our extension cable from our desk.
Follow these few tips here to get the best low-visibility results.
- Choose the outlet you can’t see when you walk into a room.
- Outlets behind furniture are great potential locations.
- An outlet that can’t be seen when working at your desk is also a good idea.
Having a specific outlet in mind will help us with the next step.
Plan Your Cable Route
Ultimately, we have to plug in our power strip into an extension cord, and then plug the extension cord into our chosen wall outlet. We should first think about a few ways to route this extension cord.
Imagine visually what this would look like, similar to the image above.
Try to plan a route that follows the natural lines of your desk and room. For most people, you can have the extension cord go down one of your table’s legs that is nearest to the chosen outlet.
This is the easiest way to disguise an extension cable as it leaves your desk. This method makes it look like the extension cable is part of your desk in the first place.
Now that we have the planning stage done, let’s get into the details of the step-by-step.
Managing Cables At Your Centered Desk
Cable managing on a normal desk just means concealing cables when viewed from the front. A desk that is in the center of the room is much more challenging as it has to conceal cables from almost every angle.
I typically got away with hiding cables behind my desk drawers. However, since I purchased my FlexiSpot E7 standing desk, my cables didn’t have anywhere to hide anymore.
A desk in the center of the room means the back of the desk is visible, and this is where the cable mess usually lies. Here’s how you can take control of the cable mess!
As we touched on before, plug all your electronics into a single power strip. This will make the cable management process much simpler.
Use Large Cable Management Rack
If you want a super simple solution, purchase an attractive-looking cable management rack. These are large racks that conceal cables from the back side of your desk and the front side.
Your cables simply travel from your desk to the inside of the cable management rack. The entire power strip with all your electronics plugged in can be placed inside of these racks.
Power bricks and excess cables can also be simply dropped into these racks, that’s how large they are! It doesn’t get simpler than this.
The backside of your desk no longer looks like a mess of cables, just a clean metal panel. Here’s a great example of a rack that hides cables from all angles:
This cable management panel keeps cords organized and out of sight. It blocks the view of all cables behind a durable powder-coated steel panel. It comes in two sizes to fit a large variety of desks.
There is a similar cable management tray from Ergonofis that is a little more pricey. It does come with a 9-outlet surge-protecting power strip for convenience.
Even with the power strip, it’s still a little overpriced. A similar 450-joule surge protector power strip probably costs around $30 by itself.
Ergonofis is a bit of a boutique and high-end brand, similar to Grovemade. So the high price is a little expected.
Hidden Under Desk Cable Management
If you don’t want to introduce a huge rack visible under your desk, there are more subtle ways to hide your power strip and cables underneath your desk.
My recommended method of hiding cables very subtle under your desk is to first mount your power strip under your desk. This is a must for standing desk owners.
Mounting a power strip under your desk is a very effective way to keep the power strip out of sight. It’s very hard to see things that are directly underneath a desk.
This is a big benefit to chase with desks that are centered in the room.
Mounting a power strip alone will still result in a ton of hanging cables going down from your electronics and back up into the power strip. This is why you have to combine power strip mounting with cable raceways.
Here’s an example of a cable raceway for those with a lot of electronics. I own the item below myself. The main benefit of this product is the high capacity of cables it can hold.
This cable raceways kit provides an easy way to manage and organize a large capacity of cables with parallel openings for easy assembly. Made with high-quality PVC and excellent insulation, it is suitable for any cable management job.
If you have fewer cables, another great option that I also have used in the past is this cable raceway below. These have a J shape to them which completely conceals cables from one side.
This easy-to-install cable organizer has a sleek design and strong adhesive tape, holding up to 10 power cords or 16 Cat-5 ethernet cables. It is a must-have for every home or office, providing a simple solution for cable management under the desk.
The goal here is to simply conceal a cable as it goes from point A to point B, and these cable raceways do a great job.
If you have large power bricks, I recommend using strong double-sided tape to attach those to the bottom side of your desk. I do this for a very low-profile look.
No cable management rack will be as low profile and as out of sight as mounting everything directly underneath your desk.
Conceal Single Power Cable Travelling To An Outlet
Now that we hid the power strip along with the cables underneath the desk, you should only have a power strip cable visible. This next part is how you really conceal cables for desks in the middle of a room.
Because we consolidated all of our electronics to a single power strip, we just need to hide a single extension cord as it travels from our outlet to our desk.
It’s way easier to hide a single extension cable across the room vs. a bunch of electronics. Here are some of the best ways you can hide that center traveling extension cord towards your desk.
Use Carpet or Rug to Conceal Extension Cable Travel
The easiest way by far to hide an ugly extension cord that is traveling in the middle of your room is to cover it up with a carpet.
If you want to get really fancy and purchase a carpet for this exact purpose, you can make a small hole in the carpet where you want the cord to connect to your desk.
And if you are worried about having a desk chair with wheels on a carpet, check out our article on chair mat alternatives. In this article, we talk about how your chair casters are the real culprit.
Carpets come in all shapes and sizes so you can get very creative on how this hides the cable on its way to your desk.
You can choose a runner which is a longer carpet giving your extension a straight line to the wall. Or you can choose a carpet that covers a large majority of the room’s floor giving you much more flexibility with wall outlets.
Use Low Profile Wall Plugs For Minimal Attention
We are not done yet! We can still make your wall outlet look much more clean. Don’t settle for a normal extension cord that has a plug that protrudes super far out.
Instead, use one of these super low-profile extension cords! It completely covers up the wall outlet itself.
This outlet cover hides cords and plugs, reducing clutter and hazards. It's ultra-thin and blends with the wall, and no tools are required for installation. The kit includes adhesive cord concealer strips and clips, and it's compatible with all duplex outlet sizes.
Crucially, this extension cord also comes with a flat cable design. This will work extremely well when placed under a carpet.
Other extension cords will be very obvious visually and physically when you accidentally step on them. This extension cord is as close to invisible as you can realistically get.
Hide Plug Connection Behind Furniture
If you don’t want to see your outlet whatsoever, it would be a good idea to plug in your extension cord behind some furniture. This could be a drawer set, a bookshelf, pretty much anything.
A low-profile wall plug would still be advantageous if you plug in your extension cord behind some furniture. This is because your furniture would not need such a huge gap from the wall.
I used to hide all my plugs behind my ALEX drawers, and it’s a very effective method!
Use An Extension Cord That Matches
The last tip here is to use an extension cord that matches the area where it is exposed.
If you plan to run your extension cord along one of your black desk legs, use a black extension cord. If you plan on running the cord along the floor of your white wall, use a white cord.
Details like this result make a huge difference and can result in a perfectly cable-managed desk in the middle of your room.