I think having a plant stand indoor at different levels accentuates the living space! Since I am more of a in-store shopper than online, I like to see and feel things that I like to buy. I have seen many metal plant stands at TjMaxx and Home Goods but none of them were appealing to me. Then few days back saw a DIY video on how one can make plant stand using dowels and concrete. There are many versions available, I always combine different ideas into mine!! In one video, the dowels are tied with a string with equidistant and rested in the concrete mix and taped but in another one they used line level(tool) to check if they are equidistant.
Since I pushed my other project(making tree faces) away for a while now, this plant stand project took precedence!!
Went to Home Depot, asked a staff to help me pick the right concrete that might work. So I opted for Quikrete Commercial Grade ($4 a big bag of 80 lbs). Staff offered to get a crate and load this mix onto crate. It was impossible for me to move this bag from crate onto my car so if you are of my stature(under 135 pounds) then get help from staff!! After getting back home, I ripped the top part of the bag and moved them into different plastic bags for ease of moving and storage.
I added roughly about 2.5 lbs of concrete mix into this cake cover and mixed with water. Did not measure the water though! Should be of Idli batter consistency :-) I stuck in the dowels little away from center. Gently tap the mix from outside to let the air bubbles pop out. I was very much concerned about its right placement, else I would end up having woobly plant stand. I had line/surface level(tool) to measure its distance. Basically they should be equidistant from one another. I then secured each of the dowels onto cover with painter's tape. I wanted to reuse the cake cover so had to give one day time to cure. This morning when tapped from all sides the stand came out clean.
Since I pushed my other project(making tree faces) away for a while now, this plant stand project took precedence!!
Went to Home Depot, asked a staff to help me pick the right concrete that might work. So I opted for Quikrete Commercial Grade ($4 a big bag of 80 lbs). Staff offered to get a crate and load this mix onto crate. It was impossible for me to move this bag from crate onto my car so if you are of my stature(under 135 pounds) then get help from staff!! After getting back home, I ripped the top part of the bag and moved them into different plastic bags for ease of moving and storage.
Then I purchased 2 wooden dowels (7/8 of an inch) and asked staff to cut each of them into 3 equal parts. So they were all 16 inch tall dowels of 6 in total. I did watch few videos on doing this plant stand where they end up tearing bucket or the container used. Keeping that in mind, I used plastic cake cover that we normally get from store to cover the cake!! It was a cover for an 8 inch Birthday Cake that we ordered last week for my daughter's Birthday!! I sometimes use them as plant saucer under few pots too!!
This mix mainly had tons of small pebbles and cement, so was expecting uneven surface on top but to my surprise the top was super smooth.
Since I had left over paints, I used them to give it a better look!! I can make around 30 more of these plant stands with the concrete left :-)
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