Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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We are remodeling the third floor of our house, and in the course of rewiring, an smidgeon of conflict has entered into the atmosphere here at the House of Happiness.

Let me explain. For many years I have maintained an office in the home, upstairs from the living quarters. In the house proper, we would never condone wires, extension cords, powerbases, power strips, and loose phone cord. It doesn't look nice.

In my office, however, I condone all those things and more. It's a perfect jungle of electronic gear, with sinuous creepers, curling vines, and fiber optic runners snaking along the office floor.

For the last four months, for instance, I have hung over my PC the kind of yellow rubber-coated lamp, with a shielded cover, that mechanics suspend from car hoods. My regular fluorescent lamp died, and this was my temporary solution.

You see, I'm not especially handy. I once tried installing a doorbell, and used an electric stapler to secure the bell wire to the molding. Each staple pierced the wire insulation, touching the copper and causing a short of the system -- some 30 in all.

Another time I tried to make a dog door, and mistakenly put it on the top half of the door, instead of the bottom. Up, boy, up!

The past month, I have limped along with a fax line leading out a third floor window, down along the chimney, then slithering back under the window sash and into my temporary first-floor digs. It looked like the Kallikaks gone high tech.

It didn't work too well, either, because instead of 50 feet of continuous wire, I used two 25s, with an uninsulated indoor adapter connecting them alongside the house exterior. I could make connections OK on sunny days. But after it rained, all I got when I tried to log onto the Internet was this squishy waterlogged sound.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Under the terms of the remodeling, my new enlarged office space will also be a kind of family room. Why? Because it will be too pretty for just me. Ergo, no Finlevian stopgaps or workarounds will be permitted.

When I moved everything downstairs, even I was astounded at the amount of wires. Altogether, I had all this plugged in: two PCs, a laptop, two monitors, two printers, two scanners, two external modems, a standalone fax, a backup tape drive, four room lamps, a fan, an air conditioner, a stereo, a battery charger, a video recorder, and a pencil sharpener. In addition I have three phone lines, one for fax/data, one for office voice, and one for home voice. Plus a minicassette transcriber, clock, telephone and answering machine. That's 27 appliances. When I power up, waterfalls groan.

OK. Try plugging all this stuff into two wall outlets and two phone plugs. It can be done, but you need about 120 feet of phone wire, and a dozen power strips. Power strips are cheap, and they include some level of surge suppression, but they have shortcomings as well.

First, if you daisy-chain multiple power strips, each one containing four outlets, you use one of the four to plug the next power strip in. What you really need are a couple or three 12-outlet power strips, but I haven't seen any anywhere.

Second, the outlets on these strips are arranged in a tightly clustered pattern. Perfect for small plugs -- toasters, vacuum cleaners, and soldering irons -- but less perfect for the kinds of fat AC adapters most computer peripherals use.

You know the kind I mean, that have a big heavy 3" or 4" surge box built into the plug. They're so big that each one takes two or three plug spaces. Sometimes I had an entire power strip devoted to a single stupid peripheral plug, like the massive and butt-ugly plug attached to my tiny and seldom-used scanner.

Something clearly has to give, and Rachel has given me an ultimatum, that I must design the office electrification so that this time it does not look like a jungle of wires. We have wisely consulted with a telephone consultant on part of this project, and pre-installed phone outlets that match up to the points in the room where phones and modems will be. That is a victory.

But the electric plugs are more challenging. I'm told there are outlets that space the plugs further apart, and I want to order about twenty of those, strategically located as close to the offending cables as possible.

If that doesn't work, it's time to roll out Plan B: stop pretending it's not a jungle, hang Spanish moss from the dangling wires, and pipe parrot calls through the PA system.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.