Then I not-iced that the sewing machine box came with an extra piece of cardboard that just fit the opening. That became a door. Next, I was thinking to myself, "this needs a door knob" so I put one on. Carol loved it. As a finishing touch, I grabbed the little LED lights I had made once as a proof of concept and stuck them in through the handle for light.
Well, I couldn't stop there. Carol seemed to like the lights, but she kept pulling on them since they were just dangling around out of the ceiling. During her nap, I decided to finally do that learning project I had meant to do for some time--making something cool out of LED lights. Not that there's much to it, I just wanted to do it so I could learn whatever it had to teach me (oh, yeah, and it sounded like fun, too).
The idea was simple: I would just hook up a 9V battery to an array of LEDs. That was all well and good, but to make it more fun, I decided we needed a light switch so Carol could turn them on and off. She likes light switches.
Now she could turn the lights on and off with the flick of a switch. Cool, huh? There was just one problem. I knew I could do better. Lowes was calling my name to come get a door handle instead of a ceiling hook. I was annoyed that the cardboard door kept opening and I decided to put magnets on the door to keep it closed, but make it easy for little hands to open. Someone at church gave me the idea to put a doorbell on, and so I visited Radio Shack for a little buzzer (that's the red button in the upper left). I added some support braces to keep the house sturdy. 
Most of all, I decided that if one light switch was good, then 3 was better. So far, the lights were all blue (there were 4 in the top of the box). I figured if I added 4 reds and 4 greens, then the light in the box could resemble white light if they were all on, but I wanted to be able to turn each color on and off independently. 
This called for more wire! I didn't want to use 3 batteries, so I figured out how to wire all the switches to use 1 battery but still be independent of each other. 
Not that big of a deal and certainly not the first time anyone has done it like that (in fact I'd say electricians do it several times a day), but I thought I was clever to do it on my own none the less. There! Now all the groups of lights (grouped by color) could be turned on and off independently. I still have more LED colors (orange, yellow, UV (i.e. blacklight), white...) and I was considering putting them in, too, but I started thinking--I don't want a cardboard box sitting around my house forever and the more time I put into this, the harder it will be to get rid of it later. So I think I'm done now. I'll have to save the other enhancements for when I have a real house. By then maybe I'll move away from cardboard on make a cool tree house, instead....
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