How to Turn Molding Into a Charging Station

Every evening you arrive home and divest yourself of ringing, beeping, buzzing accessories, dropping them like bread crumbs on the way to the bedroom. In the morning you lose precious minutes in a cushion-lifting scramble to gather PDA, phone, and iPod.

Your portables clearly need a home base. A dedicated storage space for all your electronics not only saves your sanity but also prolongs their battery life. That's because the lithium-ion cells in these devices have a finite number of full discharges, so they last longer if you leave them plugged in when not in use.

You can easily make your own kitchen office charging station. As This Old House general contractor Tom Silva shows here, shelf brackets and stock molding make a quaint corral. In fact, you can put this one together in just over an hour—the time it takes to locate your vibrating cell under the throw pillows.