DIY Home Mandir/Temple under 100$ for small apartments
- patelfalguni3
- Aug 17, 2020
- 3 min read
Hello everyone, my name is Falguni Patel welcome to my very first blog. I am originally from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Currently residing in the USA and a Homemaker. I am not an avid blogger or DIYer but I love crafting, painting, and sometimes cooking or baking š.
Now I never thought of writing a blog or would prepare an elaborate document of this nature. Hence, I never clicked any pictures or recorded any videos of the process.
It took us almost two months to the finished product from the day we got the cabinet home and slowly started the process of buying, waiting, understanding, and then finally assembling the parts. It was a learning curve for us too. I alone cannot take the credit for this creation as most of the assembly work was done by my husband. So in an essence, I am the brain and the beauty while he's the brawn.
I sincerely apologize for any mistakes in advance.
So coming to the title of the blog and the reason you are here; the following are the lists of parts and accessories used in this project.
Cabinet
Floating shelves
Finials (option 1)
Finials (option 2)
Wooden Tray
Drawer runner
Square Dowel
Cabinet lights
Glue
E6000 crafts adhesive
Besides the above-mentioned parts and accessories, one will need a Saw to cut down the square dowels and Drill and Driver kit or Screw-driver to fit the pull-out tray.
How to fit the Pull-out tray:
Since the cabinet doors are fitted as such that it has a 1-inch overlap inside the cabinet when opened both lengthwise and depthwise. So we cannot fit the drawer runners directly onto the sides of the cabinet. We need a 1-inch square wooden dowel as spacers in order to fit our pull-out tray.
Next measure out the depth of the cabinet excluding the door overlaps on the inside when left open. In our case it was 10.5 inches, hence a 10-inch drawer runner and two square wooden dowels 10-inches each. (Here one can either saw down the dowels at home or opt for the complimentary cutting service available at Home-depot or at Loweās).
Screw-in the base of the drawer runner on the square wooden dowels. Paint the dowels to match the cabinetās color.
You can either super glue or screw-in the dowels mounted with the runner base to the sides of the cabinet where you wish to install the tray.
I left around 8 inches gap between the base of the cabinet and the pull-out tray to make some storage space and added a foldable storage drawer from Dollar store (optional).
Then screw on the other part of the drawer runner to the wooden tray (20āx10ā). The runners are marked with āRā for Right and āLā for left so make sure you have them in the correct orientation.
Now you can slide in the tray across the runner base mounted on the dowels and youāre done.
You can either paint the wooden tray to match the cabinetās color or use a self-adhesive shelf liner from the dollar store as I did.
āShikharaā or the Dome of the Temple
For the Shikhara, we used the Floating shelves mentioned in the table above. Stacked them and super glued them to get the desired shape. Lastly, I glued a rounded finial painted with gold metallic paint on the top.
There are endless possibilities and ideas to decorate your mandir with paints, stickers, beads, etc. For example, I painted the finials and cabinet handles with metallic gold acrylic paint and used acrylic stickers like the Swastika, Laxmi Charan/Padukon, and Shubh-Labh bought from Etsy.com. I also painted the doors with the Tri-Shakti symbol.
As seen in the pictures we chose wired cabinet lights but you can also use stick-on push lights available in the market.
Here are some of the pictures of our mandir
Lastly, I would like to apologize for a really hasty article and all the bad picture quality. This too is a learning curve for me. Hope whoever reads this blog gets inspired and motivated to build their own little mandir.
Thank you so much for reading! Happy DIYing...
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