How to Hide Household Clutter
As beautiful as new houses are, it’s hard to camouflage electronic equipment, cords, phone, laptop and tablet chargers, trash bins and other useful clutter. A quick scan of a few creative DIY sites reveals a few genius tips on how to organize and hide household eyesores, that are just too clever to keep to ourselves!
Cord Clutter from Electronics
The trade-off for having instant communication and information at your fingertips is charging those various smartphones and tablets on your countertops, tabletops and desks. One solution is building a charging station inside a drawer and HGTV has a video tutorial to help you do it. The secret is a power strip mounted onto the back of the drawer that can accommodate multiple devices. Not only can you charge day or night out of sight, but everything’s within easy reach!
If you don’t have the perfect drawer for storage, take an upmarket wooden breadbox, drill a hole in the back, and add a power strip with hook and loop tape, and create a false back covered with contact paper to hide the cords.
Hiding the Electronics
Haley Jones, at Me and Mr. Jones, posted a video on Facebook to show how she hid an ugly router – one that happened to be in the middle of a room. Using a vintage suitcase, topped with an antique Coca Cola crate/wagon, she stacked books in front and on both sides for a quirky décor piece that hides not only the router, but the electrical outlets, too!
Off-Season Fireplaces
Blogger Lia Griffith chronicles her DIY projects like the birch fireplace cover to inspire other DIYers and share the creativity. To match the rustic mantel, Lia glued disks of birch wood two-to-four inches thick to a painted (black) piece of plywood.
The effect looks like stacked firewood, and the round birch wood complements the geometric grid of her tiled fireplace.
Camouflaging Kitty Litter
We love our cats, but the little box can be a stinky eyesore, no matter how clean you keep it! Here’s a way to hide the kitty station so no one every knows where it is except the cat! And it’s not just a place to contain the unmentionables, this clever DIY Network project also has a place for kitty to take cat naps!
Hiding Trash Bins
If there’s one thing people want out of sight it’s the trash. Blogger Corey at Sawdust 2 Stitches turned a cabinet into a kitchen island with two trash receptacles that tilt out and back for a clean hideaway. She started with a $5 garage sale cabinet and made sure her trash and recycle bins fit, and then went to work adding cabinet doors, casters, and a countertop. Corey reveals some insider secrets for this project, which takes some seasoned DIY know-how, but the result is brilliant camouflage.
Office, Dining, and Cookbook Clutter
We’re seeing these floating credenzas everywhere, in different rooms, built to hide all sorts of clutter that we need, want or cannot part with. Some call it a fauxdenza, and most of the instructions started with Ikea kitchen cabinets because they’re economical and come in a variety of sizes. 
From the DIY Playbook is a fairly detailed tutorial which shows how framing the cabinets in stained, inexpensive birch plywood (gettable from the Lowe’s on Dillon Rd. in Louisville) upcycles the look by 100 percent. Or, you could stop by the Lafayette Collectibles and Flea Market on E. Spaulding Street and check for just-the-right cabinets. The inventory changes from month-to-month and a look at online photos reveals one or two possibilities for the chic DIYer.
Clever and Chic in Colliers Hill
The homeowners in the master-planned community of Colliers Hill are creative interior decorators and delight in putting their signature stamp in-and-outside their homes. If Colliers Hill isn’t your neighborhood, stop in and see the chic model homes crafted by Meritage Homes, Shea Homes and Richmond American Homes in both ranch or two-story designs, and priced from the upper $300s to the $600s.
