Drawers from an Ikea Fira mini-chest hacked into a simple charging station.

So this isn’t exactly audio-related, but I wanted to share about an Ikea hack I completed recently.  The headache of charging all of our various gadgets – cell phones, ipods, baby monitors – including finding discreet places around the house to plug in the power supplies and to stow the charging device safely from our active 18-month old son, finally compelled me to hack together a solution.

A quick search of charging stations sold online found a plethora of designs, unified by the challenge to hide the tangled mashup of odd-shaped power supplies, cords of various lengths, and a single power strip to juice it all.  But as usual, many of these products were overpriced and, in some cases, overly-designed.

A search through the house led me to an Ikea Fira mini-chest that we’ve had for years.  Its two medium-sized drawers in the middle looked promising.  The goal was to create a simple unit that would have enough room to store and hide all of the cords, the power strip, and to hold our gadgets without a lot of fuss.  It would have to be somewhat expandable.

Cords and power supplies are stored in the bottom drawer. One extra long cord was cut to free up some room.

The charging station was a piece of cake to make.  I stacked the two empty drawers, placed a white extension cord into the bottom drawer, then hinged both pieces together.  Then I drilled a rough hole through the bottom of the top drawer.  I made sure to have the finger holes facing the back the of the unit, because the hole in the bottom drawer was a natural opening for the main power cord.  There is actually another extension cord extending the main cord, to fit all of the different-sized power supplies.  To make it less crowded, I cut and shortened that second cord, using black electrical tape to cover up the exposed wire.

The Fira’s front is turned to the back to provide an opening for the main power cord. Ignore the extra holes on the left hinge.  I was a little over eager at the outset.

As you can see, the result was a plain and simple charging station that sits on our kitchen counter.  If the baby monitors were smaller, I would have taken a third drawer and hinged it to the top as a cover.  But now at least we have one centralized place to charge all of our gadgets.  A random act of organization to tame those feisty modern devices.