a few days a go i showed you my kids’ bathroom redo, and showed a quick picture of this little project.

i can’t take credit for this idea or even completing this project – it was all my parents.  well, i supervised and took pictures and gave my opinions, but really it was all them.  yes, you can be jealous.  they are awesome.

my mom is a thrifter and i am the beneficiary of that occaisionally.  she found three perfectly sized cake pans and we bought a threaded rod

and cap nuts and jam nuts.

 we had to start by finding the center of our circle.  i’m sure there’s a mathematical way of doing that, but we had our own ideas…

we (my mom) traced the base of the pan with a pencil and cut it out

 then folded the circle into quarters.  the tip of our circle would be the center of the pan!

 with a pencil we (my mom) marked the center of each pan, making a paper circle for each of the different sizes.

 then we (my dad) made a pilot hole in each pan with a nail, just to make drilling the hole a bit easier.

 with a drill bit just smaller than the size of our threaded rod, my dad drilled a hole through each pan.

 because the pans are somewhat flimsy, the pan needed to be hammered around the hole a bit to flatten it back out where little pokey metal pieces were.

then we started by putting a nut on the bottom of the threaded rod, then slid the largest cake pan down.

then we put another nut down on top of the pan so it was sandwiched between the nuts.

 when we screwed the nuts tight it help the pan securely.

we could have measured the midpoint, but we just eyeballed instead, and added another nut there, then slid down the medium size cake pan down.  you can see how lopsided the middle pan is because the top nut wasn’t added yet.

 then we added another nut for the final cake pan, added the cake pan, and finished it off with another nut.

 once we were done there, we flipped it all over and needed to add “feet” to the base so it would sit flat.

 again, measuring on a circle was tricky, so we did our best and eyeballed it for the most part.

 we used 3 cap nuts and e6000 glue.   the glue takes awhile to dry.  after we got the nuts in place, we flipped the trays right side up so the weight would help to press the nuts on better.

and here’s the tray in action!  i contemplated spray painting it a fun color, but i actually ended up loving the texture of the original trays!

 now lipgloss, headbands and posy hair clips have a home!