How my dad shut me up with a hardware store and a cupcake stand

I searched for months, looking for the best cupcake stand. Both my mother and I nit-picked at everything we saw online. Too small. Doesn’t look solid. It’s ugly. It doesn’t really match. Look at the price tag! We would go on for hours until we gave up the search for another day. My dad of course grew tired of our bickering about a cupcake stand of all things. So what did he do about it? HE MADE ME THE PERFECT ONE.

He came home one day after a trip to the hardware store. He had three raw wooden circles (each getting smaller in diameter), two short wooden legs, three wooden round legs, and some screws and other small supplies. He immediately got to work and refused to answer anyone’s questions about what he was doing.

After a short period of time, he asked me to come in the kitchen and pointed to the raw, wooden, three-tiered cupcake stand he just made, and said, “Now paint it how you want it and give me some peace.”

So I stained the three circles a very dark brown and painted/distressed the legs with an off-white. I had a lot of stamps from making my guest book and just chose the biggest from among them, which happened to be a clock, for the final detail. For my vintage wedding, it was perfect — sturdy, large, vintage-esque and cheaper than anything we’d looked at before!

Here’s a breakdown of what he did:

Marked the center of each circle, inserted a screw to secure the wooden leg. Yes the top circle now has a hole in it, but that can be remedied with wood putty (which will not stain the same color if using stain). We just left it, as I wanted to throw a doily on top.

The three wooden round legs I mentioned went on the very bottom circle as legs for the whole stand, so that it wouldn’t need to be slid off a surface to move. You can just pick it right up from the table.

He mentioned that you could achieve this whole project with wood glue as well, pending you had the patience and the right tools to secure it without nudging so that it wasn’t off centered.

It held roughly 75 typical-sized cupcakes. We had a pearl type bead string weaved in and out of the cupcakes. Yes, we printed and cut out almost 100 musical cupcake wrappers to pop the cupcakes in, it was horrible. But oh so perfect.

If you take a trip to a hardware store, you could make this any size you’d like, and in any shape! There will be varying sizes in wooden legs available, or if you know someone handy with a saw, you could make your own legs. I chose to stain/paint mine, but you could paint the whole thing, leave it raw, modge-podge, glitterfy, I mean anything is possible! You can add or subtract tiers, or maybe make your own simple cake stand.

My father is a genius and I thought I’d share with you his solution to my problem in hopes that it saves someone else hours of research and money.