You are both right, of course, and the advice you give is sensible. It's just that in some ways, I'm not very sensible. My parents were both born before the depression, and both were quite frugal. We all learned to be frugal, too. My grandfather, a master of thriftiness had little stashes of neatly ordered bits of this and that, all stored in one out building or another around the farm. When he needed something, he made it rather than buying it, and I picked up on that. I enjoy making something that I want or need from the discards and cast-aways of others. An exchange student from Hungary who stayed with us for two academic years told friends that my then 10 year old son & I were "stuff makers from garbages". It was said with admiration, and it stuck.
While most of us have both traits, some lean more towards goal orientation while others are more process oriented. Arriving is almost a disappointment because it means the end of that journey, and to me, it's the journey that holds my interest. In the end, I may well contact The_Beast with my layout for a quote. While finances are a concern, it's not so much that I couldn't budget enough to pay a contractor to make the two I'd want. I'd very much like to purchase a laser cutter, and it's within the realm of possibility, but our furnace needs some work, as does the car, and those things are probably a higher priority. I just enjoy working on what some might call tedious little jobs. I've recently taken early retirement, though I still work some. That's given me more time to do the kinds of things I like doing. Most of those things are things about which I might have said that I would rather do it myself.
Cutting the holes a bit small, and filing them to spec is what I was thinking, too. In aluminum, the job wouldn't even be too awful slow. I'd turn on The Dead or Pink Floyd or Yes, switch into right brain activity, fall into a zen-like state, and loose all track of time until it was finished.
