The Black Boxes are Missing

In a post below, you saw the built-in cabinets I built in our sunroom. The shelves are only 10.5 inches deep to preserve space in a narrow room. As a result, what Becca refers to as our Black Boxes (DVD player, TiVo, xBox) stick out and look really bad in the room. See below.


The wires hanging down are ugly, and the boxes are ugly, too. The wire problem can be solved with a cord tube (some thing like this from Amazon), but the black box problem is more intractible. To make matters worse, I bought a Sony 400-Disc DVD player from a friend a few weeks ago, with the thought of organizing all of our DVDs in the player. Our kids scratch our DVDs up, and they are only getting worse. (Parenthetically, the player turns out to be AWESOME--you can enter DVD information by plugging a PC keyboard into it, and it holds 400 DVDs. The player is a bit sensitive to scratches on DVDs. I got a disc repair machine to fix them, and it has worked great). The main downside of the DVD player is that it is BIG (it's not seen in the photo above), and it pushed the whole black box issue over the edge for us. On the other hand, it has freed up a ton of space on shelves we had devoted to DVD storage.

I have thought for a while that it would be cool to put all of our black boxes in the basement of our house, with the TV being the only visible audivisual component in the house. I imagined that all I really needed to do this would be longer cables and cords, a hole in the floor, and something to transmit the remote control signal down to the black boxes in the basement. Radio Shack sells a wireless remote extender that takes signals from a little box by the TV and sends them to somewhere else in your house wirelessly. I bought this, and it works like a charm. I built a little table in the basement for the black boxes to sit on, routed the cables up through the wall, and placed the little IR repeaters under the TV and on the black box table.

The only part of the project that isn't complete is wiring the surround sound from the surround sound receiver in the basement up to speakers in the room. But there is enough room to do this, and I am waiting to find a good deal on a Bose system on eBay or Craigslist. Here is my powerpoint diagram of what the system sort of looks like. Those black things on the floor by the chairs are the speakers. I hope to find some small white ones that are not that conspicuous.