Wine box to phone charging station (upcycle)

Happy new year, dear Reader! Have you made a new year’s resolution yet? I did. In fact, I made several. One of them was to get more organized. I’m not messy, but—truth be told—I am not really as organized as I could be either. Who is? And being “not all that organized” is not so good for someone who likes to think of herself as organized. My personal chaos (I’ll call a spade a spade) mostly applies to things of the electronic nature…particularly, cables.

Some years ago, I did make a small attempt to organize the electronic cables that had been randomly strewn across my dresser by putting them all into a shoe box.  That way, they were at least somewhat contained. But in the meantime it has ended up looking like this: 

And somehow, random things kept ending up in that box. Like pens. (I swear I didn’t put them there.) So, I knew something needed to be done about the situation. But what??

When I was in New York last year hanging out with my BFF, I saw this nifty thing. 

Well, I thought the concept of having free access to charge one’s phone in a public place was the best thing since sliced bread or at least since free Wi-Fi (which is scarce in Switzerland). After a while, I realized that it wasn’t just nifty, it was the solution to my problem. I needed my own charging station at home!

It took me a couple of months and rounds of drafts to figure out how I wanted mine to be. Then it took another couple of months to actually get the stuff together, but finally I have my charging station. And here’s how I did it.

Approximately a bajillion years ago, we received a present of two bottles of wine in a lovely wooden box. The wine was long gone, but I still had the box—much to my husband’s chagrin each time we cleaned out the basement.

“Can we throw this away?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s too nice to throw away.”
“But you’re not using it.”
“Well, I am going to make something out of it…someday.”
“Yeah, right.” 

Anyway, I measured the box and all the phones, ipods, and other electronic devices I need to charge and figured out there would be enough room for about five of them. What luck that a five-outlet extension cord fit exactly in the box.  I marked the sliding top of the box with five holes. 

I marked the far side of the box for an opening for the extension cord plug.

And I made vent holes on the side. What you can’t see here are the two grooves where the top slides open.  I realized later that these were needed to allow the cables to slide out along with the top.

 And here’s how it looks inside:

I think it looks a lot tidier now. Don’t you? 

I didn’t make this post into a tutorial because not everyone will have a box like this. But if I’ve inspired you to do a similar project on your own, I’d be happy if you could send me a photo of it.