NIFTY ELECTRONIC ORGANIZATION IDEAS
The goal of any charging station, besides charging your electronics, of course, is to hide all of those unsightly cords and to keep your phones, tablets, e-readers, and laptops in their place. Having a charging station is really helpful, especially if you and your family has multiple electronics.
How Many Things In Your House Need Chargers? 3-4? Or 15-16? Get Organized and Get it Under Control.
The need to organize electronics first arose over a decade ago when kids started carrying cell phones and some of us are STILL struggling to get electronics organized! Suddenly there were multiple phones in the house to keep up with, not to mention hand held games and MP3 players. Now everyone in the house has multiple electronics.
The problem with most charging stations is that most are a good decade behind our needs. They'll have room for three, maybe 4 phones, and possibly some change or a wallet. Our challenge to you is to create a charging station that actually charges all of the tablets, gaming systems, music players, laptops, and phones in the house!
Now, if you think about it, that can be a lot of stuff! Even my eight year old has a tablet, e-reader, music player, and will soon have a phone. If you put two or three kids in a house with two parents and each person has three or four electronic devices, then suddenly that little three-phone charging station seems grossly inadequate.
When I came up with my charging station, I realized that my family needed 14 charging slots! No wonder our stuff is all over the house! So I got to work. I knew I needed two charging strips and a way to hide them. I needed drawers for laptops and their cases. I decided on "slots" for tablets, small shelves for tablets, flat places for phones, and holes for gaming systems and music players.
I tried lots of things, but ended up with an entryway table. It had three drawers for laptops. I drilled holes in the backs of the drawers for cords. On top I used an index card filer to "file" tablets. I used a wooden paper tray with several shelves for e-readers (tablets would work here too). Finally I used a pretty standard charging station for phones, games and music players. However, I did decide later that it was too much. I installed two more charging stations, one in the kitchen and one in the living room, so that we weren't trying to cram everything in one place. This helped me to get my family to actually use it more, too, because there was always a charging station nearby when they needed it.