Drowning in a Sea of Cords!

So, I've been having a problem. I've been obsessively looking at everyone else's apartments, trying to figure out how they deal with it and honestly, I can't figure out WHAT they do, so I finally had to break down and figure it out myself.

What's the problem?

CORDS! So. many. CORDS. 

This problem occurs at what I think you could think of as the nexus of all technology- the TV, the DVR, the DVD player, the modem, the router- it's a hot mess. My main technique has been trying to shove them all under the shelf, but it really didn't work, and having to unplug something made me want to cry.

What do you do about this kind of problem? 

HIDE IT! Yes. Hide it, like a 5 year old cleaning your room.

In my googling, I saw some products on line meant for this, but they didn't seem up to the job of dealing with my massive cord snarl. I went to IKEA, where I'd seen some of these advertised, and they were just really small. But what they DID have were these cardboard boxes. I was already using the polkadot ones to hold DVDs (and elsewhere, photos) so it seemed like a natural choice. 

Basically, what you see here is a double-wide powerstrip with all kinds of stuff plugged into it. The tricky part is that what I did was to feed the cords in through the back hole of the box (meant to be a handle). I did want my laptop cord to be available, so I fed that one out the front of the box. Put the lid on, and seriously, it was like magic. I spent a lot of time obsessively checking the bottom of the box to see if it was hot, or anything like that, but nothing like that happened, and it's been about a month at this point so I'm confident in the system, provided all your cords are in good shape and not sparky or anything crazy like that.

Here it is again... magic!