I don’t know if you’ve looked behind your TV lately, but there are a lot of wires. There’s one that connects the TV to the wall, one that connects the cable box to the wall, one that connects the TV to the cable box, and probably a few others if you have speakers or anything else extra. In our old apartment in Hoboken, we had a DVD player that we never used but that sat beneath the cable box on our TV stand. So even though we didn’t watch movies with it, it served a purpose: it hid all the wires. But because we didn’t use it there, it didn’t make the trip to Bethesda, so we had to come up with a creative way to hide all (or most of, anyway) the wires behind our TV, since our TV stand doesn’t have a back. My solution: Books!

Not only do they hide the wires, but they give the cable box a sturdy and colorful perch. The bottom level is hard covers to ensure the base would be nice and flat, then I tried to choose others that were generally the same size and had similar colors in the book jackets—I wanted it to be functional and pretty. I think it did the trick!

Don’t the books look great with everything else on our TV stand?!