Our HUGE Whiteboard

Soon after we moved in, Andrew came up with a cool idea to put a huge whiteboard in the office.  I didn’t have an opinion on the matter and he was super excited about the project, so I said it would be fun to see what he came up with.

He found a 4×8 foot shower board at Home Depot that works with dry erase markers and has a price tag of $13.  Sold! The next challenge he had was how to mount it to the wall.  The obvious solution (in my mind) would have been to put screws the through the material.  Instead he thought up a fancy bracket design, learned a computer program to model it in, and figured out how to then 3D print his design. This guy is amazing. I was shocked to see the final product that went from a rough sketch on our dining room table to something in my hands in less than a week.

Thanks to the brackets, installing the whiteboard was super easy.  We put a strip of painters tape to mark the studs in the walls to plan how many and where we wanted to put the brackets.  After securing the first one on the wall, we used a level to mark the location of the next one. We pressed the level along the bottom of the bracket already secured to the wall and then placed a second bracket against the wall along the level as well.  We moved the free floating bracket up and down the wall until the circle on the level stayed right in the middle.  Then we popped a screw through the hole. They were perfectly in line with each other with this process. We used the method to line up all five brackets on the bottom.

Thanks to Emily’s discovering of the TV remote, we were both able to work on this process.

The best part was removing the painters tape from the wall:

We popped the board into the brackets along the bottom.  I held the board in place while Andrew put the brackets along the top and screwed them in, double checking that they were in a stud.

A few days later Emily wanted to play the level game with Andrew, which is pretty much the cutest thing ever and makes us proud parents.

It is hard to capture eight feet of anything in our long an skinny room, so here is the best look at the final product I could squeeze in: