I have a desk that has a very nice, metal cable management grille attached to the rear legs, which is one of the reasons I bought the desk.

What I found though is that over time, it just became a very visible jumble of wires and zip ties. Making any changes was a pain. I have been itching to tear it out and re-do the cabling to make it pretty again, but I knew that eventually it would just get jumbled again. I started to noodle about ways to keep cables secure, but in a flexible, easy to modify way.

After some noodling, I finally arrived at pool noodles, which we just happen to have lying around. Here’s what I came up with. Slice the noodle along the length. The excess cables go into the slot and hang out in the cavity.

I wanted to run cables through the entire length of the tube if need be, so I couldn’t just zip tie the whole noodle around the outer circumference to the grid. So I drilled some holes in the back side of the pool noodle, and run the zip tie through that, along the length of the tube.

I put three sets of zip tie holes along the 32in. length of pool noodle, and connected it to the back side of the grille, facing the wall. It isn’t really visible from the front side (where I’ve attached a power strip and a power brick).

This works great. I discovered that I don’t even have to stuff the whole cable into the cavity like I originally envisioned, I can just take the slack into a loop, and jam the loop into the slot. This makes it easy to re-arrange things as needed.