When I started wedding planning last fall, one of my first to-do's was price out wedding cakes. I was shocked at what I found out. $5 a slice for cake and $500 total? REALLY?! It's difficult not to get jaded about the wedding industry when you are faced with inflated costs left and right. My solution for most of these overpriced options is to DIM (do-it-myself) or DIWDH (do-it-with-D's-help).
Instead of a traditional 3- or 4-tiered cake, we will be offering our guests a selection of our favorite desserts, like cheesecake, cookies, cupcakes, etc. I saw this project on the internets somewhere and modified it to fit our needs. It's basically a 4-tiered dessert/cake stand.
I saw these melamine plates at Michael's and immediately snatched up 25 of them for this project. The store also had cute door knobs that matched the color scheme so I bought 5 of those as well. Total cost of these plates and knobs was $30.
At Home Depot, I purchased something called Allthread that matched pretty closely to the diameter of the threaded portion of the door knob. I asked the HD guys to point me in the right direction and ended up finding everything I needed in one aisle.
After D returned home from hunting, he took up his tools to help out with the technical stuff. He matched his drill bit size to my 1/4" 20 allthread. I planned to make 5 stands, so I bought at least 5 of everything. After some broken and cracked practice plates, D switched to a ceramic tile bit and drilled holes in the center of each plate. (I think we ended up losing 6 plates.)
From one of my Home Depot trips: washers to protect the top and bottom of each plate from my tightening nuts, really long nuts to connect the allthread and doorknob, and rubber feet to make the stands more stable.
D put some weight on a couple levels to test our first stand. It held up!
Overall this project came in under $50 for 5 stands, not including our time, but we definitely would have paid more at the store for something similar. So I consider $10 per stand to be a substantial cost savings over retail.
No comments:
Post a Comment