Making DIY temple was on the bucket list for almost 2 years. Finally, this year, I decided to work on this activity. Plan was to make temple before Ganesh festival. I started to work on this project from August itself. I went through lot of videos available on YT. Even my wife and friends suggested lot of blogs, visuals and videos.
Key requirements:
1) Appropriate size. Easy to move.
2) Roomba should be able to clean the floor.
3) It should have a small storage space (drawer or cupboard)
4) It should go with the décor (especially selecting wood stain)
Based on these requirements, I draw few designs. Here is the one of the rough sketch we finalized.
Then I started to search the material. Most of the material is bought from Lowe's. Here is the list of parts.
Tools used in the project
1) Cordless Drill
2) Cordless Circular Saw
3) Miter Saw
4) Sanding Paper
Cutting the wood
Item# 470399 comes 6ft. You can ask Lowes guy to cut the wood as per following dimensions. I did not get chance to cut the wood at store. I ended up cutting these sizes at home by using cordless circular saw.
- Plank A - 16in X 24in - 3 Nos
- Plank B - 12in X 24in - 2 Nos
- Plank C - 11.5inX 11.5in - 2 Nos
Cutting the Chair rail moldings
This was again an experiment cut the moldings. I was using miter saw for the first time. It was fun to cut in 45 degree angle for Door decoration and temple roof decoration. There are lot of videos available to see the angular cutting.
• Temple Roof Décor - Part #206997
Front - 24in length - 1 No
Side - 18in length - 2 Nos
• Cabinet Door décor - Part # 214385
11.5in x 8 Nos
Temple base/cabinet
I used Gorilla Glue to paste planks A and B which makes temple base. It is a box of size 12in X 24in X 16 in. Once the glue is dried, I drilled the edges and fitted screw. I have drilled cabinet base and screwed 4 legs. [Waddell table Legs 6 in (2406)]. I marked front side, back side by pencil so that it will help while assembling the temple. The temple columns also screwed to cabinet top. The structure will look like this after this step.
Making till this level is very easy. It is time to cut the plywood and fix it to cabinet back by using nails. Size of the plywood is 12in X 24in
Door Assembly and semi-circular arch
This is the most difficult part in my view. I spent almost half day to align hinges and match door corners. You need to understand the geometry of door hinge first. In the store, there are lot of options available. I selected self closing hinges which will fit on Plank B. You need to mark the hinge drills and do it accurately. It will be a trial and error if you are doing for the first time. At one point, I thought that, it would be great to make drawer instead of door. Finally after a lot of efforts, doors aligned.
Initially, my plan was to use plywood at the back of the temple. We went to Hobby Lobby to get decoration material and gopuram knobs. I found one wooden window. I decided to use the semi circular arch part as the back of the temple. I need to cut the window into 2 sections. It was tough and tricky. It came out well and I pasted the semi-circular shape at the back.
Pasting Chair rail molding
Nails are used to fix the roof molding and along with wood glue. For cabinet door decoration, only wood glue is used. The structure looks like as below after pasting the moldings. Roof is decorated with Gopuram. All decoration material is easily available at Hobby lobby store.
Wood Staining and Decoration
This is time consuming part. We used brush, cloth pieces and tissue papers to stain the wood. Please ensure to put the entire structure on the plastic sheet before applying stain. This will reduce the stain spots on your house floor/ garage floor. Refer to wood staining videos to apply properly and evenly at all the sections.
Tip - If you able to stain the wood before assembly, that may give better finish and better results. After assembly, it takes really long time to stain the corners and intricate joints.
After staining, the temple looks are drastically changed.
After this, I have added hooks and bells.
I kept it in the sunlight for some time to dry the stain. It takes 2 to 4 days to dry completely. Wood stain has typical odor and you can smell it easily. I used eucalyptus leaves to de-odor the chemical smell.
The temple looks completely different after staining and adding decorative bells and other materials.
I added one led strips on the roof of temple. It gives a lot of pleasure to create something from scratch. It’s divine feeling. It was a teamwork. My wife and son also helped in making the temple. Entire art work is done by my wife. She had to go multiple times to hobby lobby to get the material. She pasted all the moldings and stained major portion of the temple. On the occasion of Ganesh Festival, this project was finished. Below image is the final product after doing Pooja and taken in the LED lights.
Making DIY temple is divine process. Since we are not professionals, there will be highs and lows during various stages. Lot of Trials and Errors, re-visiting home improvement stores and many more such incidents. You should be familiar with various tools available. Please do care while working on high speed machines. Thank you for reading the blog. Wish you all the best for your temple run..!!
Ganpati Bappa Morya..!!
- Abhijeet Joshi
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