When we first bought the electric fireplace for our living room, we just placed our cable box right on top. I mean, it was a natural place for it to sit, right? However, it wasn’t so stylish! It made the whole space look kinda cluttered & sloppy and I searched (& searched) for a solution. The problem, of course, is needing to control the cable box with the remote, but not being able to see the cable box!

How to Hide the Cable Box

After researching various options, the one that worked well for us was this one (affiliate). It is a perfect solution, because all you see from the front of the TV is this tiny, little receiver with a small red light.

The way it works is that the IR receiver attaches to the TV (and accepts the signal from your remote). It then sends that signal through a small cable directly to the cable box (which is hiding out of sight). We were able to place our cable box right behind the fireplace. We placed it not too close to the actual fire box, so that we wouldn’t have a problem with overheating electronics. We were able to find some space above the fire box yet still beneath the mantle itself. It’s a solution that’s working well for us!

Don’t forget, we were trying to hide this monstrosity!

A black cable box and plenty of black wires!

After we hooked up the IR repeater system, we collected all the wires together using black twist-ties, so they would remain together in a (very) small bundle. Can you see the IR repeater in this image (that little red light)?

And finally, a few well-positioned, stylish decor accents is all it took to camouflage those black wires.

The vase on the left is one piece doing serious duty to hide the wires. The white pyramid and white sphere were both found in Target- on sale of course! And on the right, I have a blue tower with a nautical theme (there’s a rope anchor on the side) and there’s also a small frame (from TJ Maxx) that I filled with a picture of my two rascals kids!

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