Decluttering the home office
After moving into our new house, painting, buying furniture, assembling the furniture, painting the furniture, reorganizing, and finally, setting up the rooms, I was anxious to get everything in our new home office set up the way I’ve always wanted it. One of the biggest problems for myself in a home office is the epic amount of tangled cables, computer equipment, and downright crap all over my desk. After some thinking and internet searching, I set off on a project to get all this equipment properly organized.
I found couple of articles on the interwebs about installing cheap pegboard on the bottom or back of a desk to keep cable- and device-clutter to a minimum, so I decided to hack together my own solution inspired by these examples.
Materials:
- Pegboard - 24″ x 48″ section
- Steel eyes - Qty. 4 (for my table, YMMV)
- Wooden dowels (if you need them) - small enough to fit through the eyes
Tools:
- Saw
- Sandpaper
- Drill
- Pliers (if you have a hardwood table)
You could probably get by with less that this, but these are the tools I had and used.
The first step in this procedure would be to cut the pegboard down to a proper size that’ll fit your table. I was lucky enough to be able to find a precut section of pegboard that fit snugly underneath my 48″ x 60″ hardwood table (which serves as our desk).
Next you need to take your pegboard and put it up under the desk to measure where you’ll make your cuts. The idea is to cut small slots for the eyes to fit through, then slide the dowels through to hold the pegboard up under the table. This way it’s securely mounted, yet not permanently so, allowing you to take it down to mount new devices or cables to it.
Mark your slots and now it’s time to cut ‘em.
I just used a drill to create the slots by drilling a series of holes along the slot, then moved the drill from side to side to connect the holes forming the slot. _I know_, this is inadvisable for the sake of your tools, but the MDF pegboard is relatively soft and the cuts we need to make are few.
After cutting the slots, I held up the slotted pegboard under the table to mark the locations to screw in the eyes. This might be a two-person process, unless you have more than two arms. Once that’s done you’ll want to pre-drill some holes if you’re working with hardwood. With a softer wood like pine you could probably hand-tighten the eyes. I grabbed my drill and a drill bit, put a small piece of electrical tape on it to mark the depth, and started drilling away. In short order, I had all the eyes installed under the table. As you can see in the picture, my table’s got support rails installed underneath. A perfect feature to mount on.
I then cut my dowel pieces into small sections with a saw and sanded them down nicely. This part’s easy.
Once I had the dowels cut, I mounted the pegboard. I’ve since discovered also that I could just turn the eyes 90° to the slots to support the board, but either way works just fine. Below are some picures of my devices I mounted underneath. I installed a power strip, cable modem, router, and an external hard drive with some 8″ tie wraps. That procedure took me about an hour to get it all installed cleanly. But our carpet is now rat’s-nest free!
