Creating a Charging Station – Adding Power Strips to End Tables

Charging Station End Tables. If there was ever a project I became totally obsessed with it was the little sofa table charging station I built for our living room years ago. A couple of hours of easy work, a USB/outlet port and BOOM we suddenly had the most used piece of furniture in our whole house. I added another charging station to our Guest Bedroom desk and then it dawned on me, why the heck wasn’t I doing this everywhere I could? I immediately thought of the ugly mess of cords I have under my end table in the master bedroom…

One perk of the power strip is that I can turn it on and off every day so I just leave everything turned on – just have to hit the switch when I get up in the morning. That’s my kindle charger, phone charger, window fan and lamp.

I’m sure we all know to NEVER leave our phone chargers plugged in EVER!

… and I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of literally leaving them plugged in all of the time …

Finding the right power strips for us to create (in my mind) the perfect charging station for either side of our bed was really important to me… I wanted an on / off switch which not all of them have!

I found these recessed power strips on Amazon and grabbed our end tables to get to work.

I picked up these old school tables at a thrift store several years back and painted them out in gloss black rustoleum to jazz them up a little. As you can see they’ve seen some wear and tear over the years and needed some love and a new coat of paint besides.

At first I was going to try and “hide” each charging station in the recess but the more I thought about it the more it didn’t bother me at all to have them right out front on the main table surface.

We have these cute baskets that fit perfect in the recess and I didn’t want to mess with them.

I marked out where I wanted them, drilled holes in each corner of the rectangle and cut it out with a jigsaw. After a dry fit of the power strips I gave each table a quick hand sanding and repainted them out entirely in gloss black Rustoleum.

(Yes, Rustoleum is an odd choice for any material besides metal / steel but its one of my favorite tricks I have up my sleeve. I learned from experience that I can prime, paint and poly with water based paint (that’s at least three coats but probably more like five…) or I can just do two coats of Rustoleum. The only real downfall is there aren’t a lot of color choices, clean up is NOT a breeze, it takes hours to dry and its pretty stinky.)

When they were dry I added in the new power strips so the cord would be aimed toward the back.

Before all the cords under my end table left a perfect environment for dust bunnies and ick. With our new charging stations we don’t have a single cord on the floor under either of our tables now!

Full on adulting: We can now sweep and mop under the tables with no problems and that makes me happy beyond all reason!

I have the power strip and my clock plugged in to the outlet and then everything else into my new charging station that, with the click of the switch every morning, gives me total peace of mind.

We also decided to get a different fan for our bedroom so that’s no longer taking up the window or a plugin on my side of the bed. Instead we found this little “fan / sleep machine” that we love.

Wish I had done this sooner!