So I been wanting a new white board in my home office to draw out some ideas and mark up some new things or even leave some messages. I remember having a big white board when I was growing up and it’s aways been really nice. I never even thought about how much a white marker board costs until I started to search for one around town. I wanted a 4′ x 3′ white board, however, it cost around $50+ dollars for one. If I drop down to 3’x2′ then it drop down to around 30 dollars (Costco). I really did not want to give up the surface space so I began to look for alternatives. After searching a while, I’ve found couple of websites talking about DIY white board on the cheap. I looked up their methods, and then I went over to Lowes to check out the material and price. i was able to get a 4’x3′ white board surface for only $9.98!!!!! And with that, I am in, I will build my own white board.
You are probably wondering well what are you really building anyways? I mean you got a surface, just nail it to the wall. In a way, yeah, you can do that, or you can even just buy white board paint and paint your entire wall to be a white wall like surface. However, I decided to go with either a frame or a hidden frame design.
After careful research, I decided to take advantage of left over wood from my home made, bed frame project few months back and use it as a support frame for my white board project. I also decided to a small piece of the left over trim as a pen holder for the whiteboard.
The following is my design.
My Material and cost
White board surface $10
small wood screws $2
tile plates x 6 : $2
contact cement : $5
subtotal: $19
wood strips around the house: $0
left over trim around the house: $0
The completed whiteboard in my office.
Challenges:
1) I found that gluing the frame on the back of the board was more difficult than I expected with out a clamp. So get a clamp.
2) I originally designed the board to be 4′ X 3′. However the board purchased from Lowes states that it is 4×3, but it is 4′ but less than 3′ high (around 2’8″). So I had to reduce my frame size.
All in all I was able to make my white board under 20 dollars and in few hours. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.
Reference:
http://www.johnmurch.com/2007/10/20/diy-whiteboard-on-the-cheap/
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/10/diy_whiteboard_with_suppo.html