What about the receiver?
Does that have a minimum voltage requirement too?
74HC4046 can be used as a tone decoder.
You can use a spare NOR gate or two as an amplifier for the IR detector.
I've drawn the circuit, just in case the book is removed from Google. I thought about copying it but the moderator would probably have removed it for copyright reasons.
You'll need to change the values for 38KHz, see the datasheet.
The Forrest Mims circuit scrapbook - Google Books