coffee bar charging station.

I've really tried to minimize belongings in our home over the last few years by using specific areas in the house for dual purposes.

An example in the old house would have been our kitchen island.  

It had the dishwasher on one side and cabinets on two of the other sides.

The top had a rustic-style organizer where bills, event invitations, and important papers landed. 

I had mason jars with pens and scissors in them.  

It was sort of the hub of the house.

The problem is that it also became the "catch-all" a lot of the time.

One of my goals for the farmhouse was to have locations in the house that would serve dual purposes, while making sure that these places didn't attract clutter.

This is where I got the idea for a coffee bar charging station.

As our girls have gotten older, they have started to spend more and more time engaged in electronics...mostly their iPads.  

We have rules for these and to be quite frank, they often end up on the refrigerator for a week at a time because the iPad is a privilege and when little girls make poor choices, privileges are revoked.

I know that as they continue to grow, we will be dealing with other types of technology...cell phones, computers, and who knows what else.

I knew I needed a central charging hub and I knew that this little space in the kitchen could be the perfect location if I would work it out right.

I ended up finding a really well-made console table at a friend's garage sale in mid-June.

I knew it would be perfect SOMEwhere in the farmhouse, so I bought it.

We had several options for using the console table in this little nook by the basement stairs in the kitchen...a mail drop-off location, more counter-space for use in cooking, or just a decorative table.

I knew that any of those three options could turn into clutter-central.

That's when my sister-in-law mentioned putting our Keurig there.

That really got the wheels-a-turning.

I decided that having a coffee bar on top of the charging station would be perfect.  And I decided to be very intentional about what I put there.  

In the old house, I always tried to hide the K-Cups.

In the farmhouse, I decided that we would embrace the K-Cups and display them by the Keurig, along with this adorable little sign I got at Hobby Lobby.

I had them in a basket that I have had for years and it just didn't have the farmhouse feel I was going for.

I'm trying to make sure that I only keep things I absolutely love and I knew this basket would bother me as we went along through the next several weeks putting the rest of the farmhouse together.

That's when I remembered these little wire baskets I saw at Dollar General a few days ago.

I had actually seen almost the same basket at Target for almost $17.  

It was $6 at DG.  Yes, please!

I needed to run into town anyway, so Claire & I stopped and grabbed the basket (and a smaller size for $4...you know, just in case).  

I really think the basket rounded out the whole coffee bar!

I still have one little piece of antique trim to add under the star, but I really love it so far.

Now, there is an outlet right behind where the wire basket sits.

Of course, there aren't enough plugs to service a charging station for the whole family...so I mounted a power strip on the wall behind the console table.  

​Nothing fancy...I literally used thumbtacks to hang it (the farmhouse has plaster walls...have I mentioned that???).

The girls picked out their own washi tape to identify their chargers and we fed them up through the drawer on the right.  

I plugged in my iPad and FitBit Blaze into the left drawer and we were done!

A functional charging station inside and a beautiful coffee bar outside.