Cord Issues: For Zooza

added later: Zooza's most elegant solution here. Well worth checking out.
As I mentioned, we need to re-wire. We have, at most, three outlets in the basement.

This is one of them:



The black cords are connected to our television cable--which we do not currently have hooked up. The wire coiled on the hook is from a tremendously long extension cord for the phone that went all the way up the stairs to the bedroom. We pulled it up, but left it here.

You can see that I have a power bar plugged into the outlet. It's over to the right, just propped up on some nails.



From here, I have a fax machine and a light plugged in: but the cord for the light (an extension cord) goes UP to the rafters and OVER the ducting and down the other side. Like this:

(I took each picture facing the ducting, that's why it looks so wonky in the middle.) Having it go UP and OVER is a new thing: it used to hang below and catch in my hair. But it still needs taming. (PS. Using those small pipes to hook things onto is a no-no. They're natural gas pipes. I had an empty coat hanger slung over one of them once and got a BIG lecture from a furnace guy. So, they're of no help at all.)

There are phone cords here:



(For future reference, those square thingys are phone jacks. For land lines. Only the top one currently works. It's connected with a cord to the REAL phone jack (somewhere else, I don't know where) which then connects us to the outside world.

And then there is this.
I love this:


I'm not sure there's anything we can or should do to this. And the long green wire, bisecting the photo? What's that you ask? I have no idea. Those coloured wires don't actually go anywhere: they just hang there in all their spidery glory.

Thanks, Zooza. I hope your idea will work for at least ONE of these monsters.