The Big Ass Whiteboard project

Ever since reading Kevin Kelley’s post on CoolTools about giant whiteboards way back in 2005, I’ve had plans of building my own vertical dry-erase landscape. Unfortunately, my home office setup over the last several years gave me precious little wall space to work with, so the project sat idled in my brain.

Everything changed with the opening of the new BIPO office in downtown Perrysburg, though. Suddenly, I’ve got tons of wall space to work with and a father-in-law looking for some post-retirement handyman projects to keep him busy. Bingo! Time to bring it to life.

I debated buying official whiteboard material (a ceramic coated metal) for a grand total of about 10 seconds. The stuff is incredibly expensive, particularly when building for size, so I quickly decided to go for the cheaper showerboard option that Kevin mentioned in his original post. Home Depot sells the stuff for about $12 per 4′ x 8′ sheet. It does have a potential downside – ghosting over time due to an inability to completely remove the marker residue, but I figured we would live with that (hopefully) minor inconvenience by either replacing the boards every so often (at $12/per….) and/or using a little Google-fu to find a better way to erase the boards after use. More on this later.

Construction was actually quite simple. First we picked a spot – we’re lucky to have a space in the back of the main floor (the 2nd floor of our building) that would accommodate three full sheets, side-by-side. Next, to smooth out the surface of our wavy walls (the building dates to the mid- to late- 1800’s), we attached a plywood backing surface directly to the studs. Once that was in place, we glued up the backsides of the showerboards, clamped them in place, and let the glue dry overnight. We added a bit of trim around the outer perimeter and between the showerboards, and viola! A giant whiteboard.

We identified a couple of tricky spots along the way:

1. The adhesive is key. Buy the best – if it doesn’t grab, you’ll end up with squishy air pockets behind parts of your whiteboard…which can be annoying and might eventually send the whole thing horizontal.

2. Related to #1, clamping the boards in place while the glue is drying is a challenging task. Have a plan ahead of time. We were winging it a bit and, luckily, came up with the idea of the diagonal braces below. A few handy FedEx boxes provided critical shim material.

3. The white surface of the showerboard we used seemed to chip relatively easily when moving the sheets around. Luckily, all of our chips were eventually hidden by the trim. Looking back, a bit of masking tape around the edges of the sheets would have prevented it in the first place.

We’ve lived with the board for nearly three months now, and it’s already become a key tool in the new firm. We use it daily to jot down tasks and notes for each other and it’s an invaluable resource in training efforts (I like to talk and draw!). I’ve already used it three times in brainstorming sessions with friends from other parts of the country, and it gives the kids a place to doodle when they come to the office.

Ghosting is a bit of an issue when the marker residue is left on the board for an extended period of time (say, more than three days). At that point, standard dry erase erasers don’t get the job done, but we’ve had luck with dryer sheets (seriously) and glass cleaner. A little Googling pointed me to this Transtronics article which has some tips that might be useful (I’ll try them soon).

We struggled with naming the beast for awhile (you can’t build something this big without giving it a name) until a client, who will remain anonymous, was in one day and said something to the effect of “wow…that’s a big ass whiteboard.” A bit crude, I know, but it captures the spirit of the thing. It stuck, and the board will now forever be known by that moniker. We’re using the acronym BAW to protect the ears of the innocent.

One final tip – we’ve started the habit of taking pictures of the BAW before erasing it. A simple and effective way to document things we’ve captured on the board.

I’m collecting some web resources related big whiteboard installations, and showerboard based installs in particular, under the tag baw_resources in the BIPO delicious account. Visit it here. I’ll update the collection as I find things.

The pictures below catalog the project from start to finish. My father-in-law Denny did all of the work, other than the heavy lifting that resulted in the chipping I mentioned above. That’s on me.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 4:04 pm and is filed under idea management and tagged with BAW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.