If you guys have stumbled over to The Broken Plow from my other blog (which is all about food, fitness and general life-y stuff), you know that I’m a huge, giant, big ole fan of Pinterest. Because I have so much love for the virtual pinboard, I started a Pinterest Challenge a few months ago. The goal? Get off the computer and actually tackle one of the amazing ideas on one of my boards. Sometimes, I’m so guilty of pinning instead of living and doing, and this challenge is my little attempt at bringing the balance back.
For the inaugural Broken Plow Pinterest Challenge, I decided to tackle something that has driven me crazy for years—my phone charger. I, like the vast majority of folks, use my cell phone as my alarm, so it (and its charger) live on my bedside table. The problem? Unsightly white cords that not only look messy, but also are constantly falling behind and off the nightstand. First world problems, yes. But still super annoying.
But thanks to the collective awesomness of Pinterest members, I found this genius:
It was definitely one of those, “Well why the heck didn’t I think of that?” moments when I saw that pin pop up. Thankfully, a very clever blogger over at The DIY Treatment did think of it. I love it when other people have awesome ideas!
I knew immediately it was a pin I must make into reality. First things first, we headed off to the good ol’ Goodwill to snag some cheap, vintage-y looking books. Craig and I spent a few minutes going through the book section looking for good size, color and titles. Only one book is used in the actual charger, but we wanted to snag a few coordinated extras to make a nice literary stack. I’m the only current iPhone user in our house (Craig is going to convert in the Fall), so I only made one charger dock, but we made sure to get enough books to make another one in the future.
Once home, I picked my top book, grabbed my charger cord, a pencil and a sharp utility knife and got to work. First step was to measure the head of the charger and mark it on the book cover.
And then I (gently) hacked at the cover with a very sharp utility knife. Let’s not talk about my manicure, k?
Four cuts later, there was a charger-sized slot.
Using a pencil, I traced the slot onto the first page of the book, and then got to cutting. I cut the slot down about 100 pages, plus a channel out the side of the book for the cord.
It took a few minutes (and a fresh new utility knife blade) but I eventually got to a point where the charger head set nicely into the book.
Once the book is closed, everything fit snuggly in, while the cord snaked out the back.
After a little bit of paper clean up, I transfered the dock to my bedside table. Voila!
Start to finish (not including the drive time to the Goodwill) the project took all of 15 minutes. A quarter of an hour to solve something I’ve disliked for years. What a beautiful, simple, genius solution!
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