I miss my ginormous magnetic whiteboard. A few years ago, back in CA, I made a huge magnetic whiteboard for our kitchen. Eric and I bought two 3' x 4' pieces of aluminum flashing and I painted them with whiteboard paint. Then Eric mounted them on the wall by our fridge to make one big 4' x 6' board. I painted some baseboard materials and Eric cut them and put them up to make a frame. I drew a big grid on part of it to make a calendar, each kid had a section to draw on and the rest of it was for note, reminders and posting paperwork, etc. It was great, fun, very useful and looked great in the kitchen.
Since moving, we haven't really had a "command central", which was sort of what that was. The calendar part is the biggest loss. I loved having that big space where we could write everything going on, color coded by person and see at a quick glance what a day looked like. It was about time to come up with something for our new home.
I'm sure that we could by aluminum flashing somewhere here but we have no clue where..... maybe eventually that will happen (although putting it up on these concrete and cinderblock walls wouldn't be a simple task). For now, I came up with an inexpensive alternative.
I cut 6" squares out of sheets of balsa wood, one for each day of the month, plus some extra. Balsa wouldn't be my first choice, but it can be found easily here, is fairly inexpensive and easy to cut. Then I painted the top inch black and wrapped pieces of whiteboard contact paper over the rest (contact paper was imported from the good ol' us of a). The black was only for aesthetics.
For the numbers I really wanted to use 2 to 3 inch die-cut numbers and paint them a bright color, but I couldn't find anything like that. Then I thought I'd print off some 3" circles with numbers in them from sticker paper I thought I had - but didn't actually have anymore. I thought it would be fun to off-set them. Finally I just made some out of address label sticker paper. It wasn't what I hoped for, but it does the job. After applying the numbers, I stuck a piece of velcro on the back of each square.
Then the opposite pieces of velcro went on the wall.
Now each month I can take off the squares an assemble them in the proper order for that month. The extra spaces are filled up with either blank squares or squares for the next month (current month in turquoise, following month in orange).
Once again, everyone has their assigned color so you can see at a glance what is going on with each person.
The top piece for the month is also removable so you can easily write on the new month, but the letters for the days of the week (painted die-cut letters) are stuck there for good. There is also a little area to the left for notes.
Seeing as there are less than two weeks left in October and I was somewhat lazy, I went straight for November. Now I just need to fill in the rest of our goings-on.
I'm kind of excited for December to hit so I can rip off all the squares and start over.
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