Blake Perdue - Website & app reviews, and technology & startup commentary
DIY Whiteboard
I love whiteboards. They are an essential tool for explaining an idea or running a brainstorming session. Drawing an idea helps me better understand my thinking. We have whiteboards in every meeting room at the ATDC, which are constantly used by our startups.
Although I’ve enjoyed the whiteboards at work, I’ve wanted to get a whiteboard for my apartment for some time. But the costs of buying a retail whiteboard are astronomical. An 8′ by 4′ whiteboard costs $239.99 at Office Depot. Not wanting to shell out $240 for basically a piece of poster board, I decided I would build one myself.
Fortunately, there are plenty of DIY whiteboard instructions on the web. You can go to your local hardware store (I went to Home Depot) and buy a cheap piece of showerboard, which is nearly identical to commercial whiteboard. Then it’s as simple as cutting some holes in the board and hanging it on your wall.
All together for the 8′ by 4′ showerboard, wall hangers, and nails was $25 — for a total savings of $214. It might not be pretty, but it gets the job done at a very cheap price. If I were furnishing office space for one of our startups, I’d buy a few of these showerboards and build floor to ceiling whiteboards.
Comments
What if you bought copper or conduit tubing and put it around it… or for a fancy finish, finishing board and stain it dark wood.
I like it though!
At our first office we bought a dozen or so of these, stood them up and covered a whole hallway so we had a 8′ high whiteboard covering the entire wall. Using hooks is a good idea – we used liquid nails and those boards got left behind because we couldn’t peel them off the wall without doing significant damage to the drywall.
link to the guides dude! you’re the #2 link on google for “DIY whiteboard”
Great post. I’ve bee thinking about buying a big whiteboard recently, but (like you) couldn’t really justify the high cost. This seem like a great idea that I’ll give a shot this weekend.
Oh, and nice pic (I remember that 2AM reality check well…).
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Great post Blake. We have two of these hanging in Sentrinsic’s office, and we use them all the time. The concern I kept reading about when using showerboard was that there’s a big problem with “ghosting” (not being able to fully erase what’s written). We’ve had ours up for about 8 months now, and they still look good. Of course, if we do have a problem, we can replace them 5-10 times for the cost of retail whiteboards.