What to do with wires...

[PartialToACupOfMilo]

We live in a small Victorian terraced house and are planning on decorating the living room in the near future - nothing particularly exciting just a lick of paint and fitting French doors to the garden.

While we're at it, I'd really like to do something about the telephone wires, but I'm not sure if it's possible. At the moment we have a telephone wire which goes around the the door frames and along the skirting - I hate it, it looks really messy. Plus a thicker one (we have cable TV, phone etc) which runs along the base of the skirting - and looks a real mess especially where we have a step up to a door. But what can we do about it?

I thought about putting up a picture rail and running them along the top (but it might look a bit weird as there are four doors in the room and they're not all the same height) and running them under the floor isn't really an option as it's carpet on quarry tiles - no floorboards to lift. Obviously it wasn't there when the house was built so it may be one of those things we just have to put up with, but has anyone got any suggestions of how we could hide it?

You shouldn't need any of those. My phone wire goes into the room through the wall where my 'main' phone is, and the other phones in the house are connected wirelessly to it.

Same as the cable - the cable goes into the wall behind where the telly is. I just have holes in the wall drilled into the rooms where the TVs are and the cable goes on the outside of the house.

Thanks Patti, but it's a terrace so I don't have any external walls for them to go along... And they come it at the front of the house - the living room is at the back through two hallways.

The wireless phones could work though, as we could just place the main handset in the front room - good idea

Are you sure they couldn't run the wires over the roof or something? I'm pretty sure I've never had to had wires through the house.

The phone thing definitely works tho!

it can go under the floor.

You can use electrician's UPVC oval conduit, which is light and fairly rigid, to poke along and then you can grapple for it where you want it to come up.

Incidentally, you must not put power cables behind skirting boards, because they will be concealed and near the surface where someone will one day drill or nail into them, but you can put phone, loudspeaker and aerial cables behind skirting. I expect you will not want to do it until you are ready to redecorate.