A giant whiteboard for $14 plus nails | Hacker News Reader

A giant whiteboard for $14 plus nails

eukaryotewritesblog.com

70 pointsmelling67 comments

Here's my top-home-tip. This one fixes your cabling nightmares.

Actually two tips. First, if you want a giant desk just buy an unpainted door. Ta-da! 2m long desk for $100. Prop it up at either end with IKEA drawers.

Now, to make your cables neat. Buy a roll of Velcro, the stuff we use in data centres to neaten cables. Buy a bunch of small screws, 10mm is big enough.

Cut a piece of Velcro about 10-15cm long. Screw it, through the center, to the underside of your desk. Repeat as required.

Gather cables neatly, secure with Velcro, bask in glory.

i went to a home-improvement market and got 1m by 2m 1" board. got a good deal on it too, because it was cut from a larger left-over piece they could not use.

added 4 table legs from ikea, and painted the board with wood-finish.

> if you want a giant desk just buy an unpainted door.

Isn't this supposedly what Amazon did in their early days?

they still do

They did, and the tip is now out of date. A latter-day Bezos would drive a U-haul down the I-5 to IKEA Renton and buy a bunch of 2 meter Linnmon desk tops for $47.99 each.

Don't buy a door. Just buy the mass-produced commodity fiberboard item made for the exact purpose. Tricks and tips are overrated.

Yeah their first table for packing.

Get a door with the pre drilled handle hole if it's the same cost. Nice for routing cables under.

For my home desk I used a second hand dining table. It's 2.5 metres long, cost ~$200, and is beautifully finished timber. It worked out cheaper and much nicer than building a desk out of new wood. The second hand market for furniture in my city is amazingly cheap.

Until just recently (wife's choice) I used an 8ft piece of Formica from Lowe's that someone had special ordered but never picked up. It cost me $40 in 2001.

I used that desk for about 18 years. Somewhere along the way I got a hole saw and drilled holes and popped in grommets where I wanted them. It was great for a desk for working (rounded from corner), the backsplash kept stuff from falling behind it, I drilled power strips into the bottom, the surface could be cleaned for eating, and it was heat resistant for soldering. For the ends, I got two Hon filing cabinets from a used office supply store for about $25/ea. Such a great desk, with our new house I may go back to it.

A friend of mine did something similar, went to Lowes and found a bunch of counter top someone ordered and for whatever reason didn't take at a steep discount, screwed it into the studs of one wall of his computer room and then used 2x4s in the front corners and another in the center of the center to act as legs. Sadly, now it is his boy's bedroom and he's no longer as cool.

Does it not have holes for the handle and lock?

You can buy them with no mortises or holes.

Here's an example: https://www.homedepot.com/p/JELD-WEN-32-in-x-80-in-Primed-Fl...

IKEA's table tops are $9 for 40", $22 for 47", $29 for 59", $47 for 78". The finishes are better than they were long ago too. The metal legs that fit any top are $4 each. If you're not near an IKEA, they ship anything under about 4 feet in length for $9.99 -- you can double up 4 feet table tops to make longer ones.

Exactly this. I looked into doors as table tops and found them to be more expensive than table top from IKEA. So we went with IKEA

Which is the most durable material for a table that I can select in an IKEA? They offer a variety of materials.

We only buy one top [0], but it holds up well. 4 years and counting and most of them are in fairly good shape.

[0] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20251139/

Though that kind is hollow. They have solid fiberboard but it caps at 59 inches and it's more than double the price.

Ikea's “Gerton” tabletop (90€ / $100. 155×75cm = 61×29.5”) is really, really nice — it uses ≈5cm-wide beech hardwood strips glued together and reinforced across the width with some metal . It works with Bekant legs (if you have a 10mm wood bit and some masking tape handy), which are also available as sit/stand legs (that's 430€ / $350, though. the non-adjustable ones are a lot cheaper.)

The hollow ones are a bargain until you try to attach a clamp on monitor stand or lamp. The clamp crushes the table top as you tighten it.

We use these at my wife's office, plus the corner pieces. We put them all on legs with wheels and stuck dual lock on the corners. Now she has desks that can be drug around and reconfigured for a pittance.

A door is a terrible idea. It’s too thick so it will be too high or your knees will hit it.

My desk at work is about 1-1/8" inch. A solid core interior door is 1-3/8". I can't imagine 1/4" extra making that big of a difference.

Why not just buy an actual Ikea desk at that price?

My advice is to splurge and get a magnetic whiteboard. I recently bought a huge one at office max for around $150.

Having a giant "magnet board" is quite wonderful. You can hang papers, play with magnet "things", and even purchase magnetic whiteboard pens and erasures that magically stick to the surface - so you never lose them.

Back in my college days when I was broke, I did use these exact shower boards a few times. As mentioned by the author, they tend to not erase well and you end up resorting to using nasty cleaner chemicals.

Yeah, that was my exact experience too. They're nice for a while, and they can make great Kanban boards, if you're into that. But I only got a couple years out of them (which is honestly fine, for their cost). If I were a bit more clever, and still needed those types of whiteboards, I would have engineered something to make it easier to remove them from the wall, without having to redrill holes.

Used this in an office at one point. Cheap, but lots of flaws. We used screws, but even so, the boards started buckling over time, probably because of the weight; I suspect some good epoxy glue is the only way to avoid that. Also, with some markers, the writing became permanent after a while. Another minus is that you can't get them in sizes as large as magnetic whiteboards.

I can recommend whiteboards from Best-Rite, like this one [1]. Comes up to 8x4 feet (243 x 122 cm), easy to hang, porcelain is easy to wipe off, has a good-looking frame, and being magnetic, you can attach things (magnetic tray, eraser pad, markers) to it. But not as cheap, obviously.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Best-Rite-Porcelain-Markerboard-Silve...

I put some cheap molding up at the top and bottom of the board so that it slid into place and was held up by that.

Worked perfectly.

When we moved into our current office we wanted huge whiteboards since we end up using them for all kinds of notes, illustrations, todo lists, etc. We looked at large boards and they were terribly expensive to ship and a pain to mount. We also looked at whiteboard paint and things similar to what’s mentioned in the article but found lots of issues with erasure, ghosting, and staining over time.

We ended up using custom printed ThinkBoard [1] stickers. We were hesitant at first but the price is relatively cheap for the size and we got them printed with our company logo with a high transparency value so it wouldn’t distract when writing over it. I can honestly say that they are amazing! We put up 2 so far. One is ~12ft x 4ft and the other is ~16ft x 5ft. We’ve been using them for over a year and have no staining or ghosting issues and we regularly leave things on them for weeks at a time. One swipe with the included microfiber cloth and it looks as good as the day we put them up. It’s basically just a big sticker so it’s pretty easy to install with 2 people. I’m not sure yet how the wall will fare when we peel them off but I imagine it won’t be bad. We also sanded the wall behind where we stuck the second board to remove any paint bumps or inconsistencies and it’s really slick. I wouldn’t say it’s required but if you have a little time and a sander I would recommend it.

[1] https://www.think-board.com/

Unfortunately, these work very poorly. It takes considerable effort to erase, even with cleaning solution, and often leaves a permanent residue. As a better solution, I would suggest the whiteboard stickers/film/vinyl that can be found on Amazon.

I’ve had better luck with the stuff called “marker board”: https://www.lowes.com/pd/23-75-in-x-3-98-ft-Marker-Board-Har...

One of the links in the article is “shower board”/“tile board” and is not made to be used as a whiteboard. It won’t be long before it starts to ghost or stain.

Buy an old sliding glass door on Craigslist, paint one side white. Remove it from the frame and mount it on your wall. High quality glass whiteboard for cheap.

Bonus points: paint it black on the other side with spray paint and use light markers.

At work we had a 4'x4' powder coated sheet of aluminum hung up in one of the engineering offices as a white board. It worked fine for about a year. We moved out of the office for some construction and when we moved back in we took some markers from another marker board. I drew a diagram to illustrate an idea, and when I tried to erase it it wouldn't come off. We tried a few more markers, and it seems that for the same family of Expo markers some colors erased from the powder coat and some didn't. The usual solutions (denatured alcohol, overwriting with an erasable marker) didn't work. Only acetone would take off the green, yellow, and purple marker. And the acetone seemed to literally peel off a layer of the powder coating under the marker, marring the surface and ruining it for further writing.

I guess you live and learn. We got a proper whiteboard to replace the metal panel.

I've done this, and gotten the nice people at Home Depot to cut the large board into 2 or 3 smaller sections. Since the board is very thin, this makes it fairly light. I don't bother with screwing them into a wall, but instead use the lightness and portability. I can literally move a whiteboard into someone's office, draw on it, and then take it with me. You can lay it flat down on a table and have everyone draw on it. It's also insanely cheap. While I wouldn't give up my glass (white)board, I do like having extra space I can draw on and move around, especially for important ideas/pictures that need to be captured later on in better ways.

I fucking love whiteboards.

So much so that I had my office desk partially covered in a whiteboard sheet[1] and used that with fine tip dry erase pens in lieu of of and paper. The collaboration that took place was off the charts.

[1] amazon.com/dp/B00NC1D5YM

I did this too: https://youtu.be/OtbXS2W_cbM But I used a board covered with laminated white stuff (It came that way as part of a merchant display). It is the greatest top ever!

I have this product mounted on my wall with mirror brackets. We run our household calendar on it (using 1/4" electrical tape). For the price, you can afford to 'refresh' it every year and still be doing pretty well. It does get damaged pretty easily, so refreshing may be needed every few years.

Mirror Clips: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Prime-Line-1-4-in-Mirror-Clip-wi...

Board: https://www.homedepot.com/p/EUCATILE-32-sq-ft-96-in-x-48-in-...

1/4" electrical tape: https://www.amazon.com/Pack-Graphic-Chart-Black-Matte/dp/B00...

I’m a fan of whiteboards, definitely, but I’ve found that I like those giant 3M Post-It note style boards with sheets of paper. (I’m not in sales either). You can easily keep or make rows of boards as needed.

Although you can take a photo of a whiteboard to save it before erasing, it’s interesting to see the hard copies of the physical sheets after a few years of work.

Rust-Oleum 241140 Dry Erase Brush-On Kit is another possibility. It's a bit more expensive but it's more flexible.

Did you get the magnetic kind? How long does it last? I've been thinking of covering a few walls of the house like the kitchen with this stuff.

I painted a relatively small spot, nonmagnetic, about 3 x 2 ft. I never thought about how long it will last. I just figured it would be as long as other paints, many many years with possible touch-ups. Call the company's customer support and ask.

The way I see it. It's relatively cheap so it can't hurt to try it.

I've done this before. The melamine erases okay, but not as well as commercial whiteboards.

I've been doing this since the 90's: go to any home building supply store and purchase a "shower wall", same thing described in the article. I remember my first one was far larger than my entire wall, and it was $7. I just used screws to mount it. I also did this at a visual effects company when I was hired, the staff thought I spend a fortune covering my office walls with whiteboard, but after I explained the entire studio soon was all whiteboards.

Add this for fun:

https://sites.google.com/prod/view/wbr/home

We panel the inside of all our 20/40” container offices with this when working at our remote sites. Makes life easier being able to just start writing anywhere

Did this at my house. Bought 4 panels, and stood them up from floor to ceiling. Best purchase ever. Sometimes erasing the board can get dirty.

I picked up the habit or writing on windows in college, and never really stopped.

Luckily my office has 3 8' windows, and a glass wall.

Been doing this for decades. FOrget $100+ whiteboards. For < $20 have a 4X8 sheet or cut it down to any size you like.

Best Article, Best Post and best website

Too bad there is no Homedepot and Lowes in India.

I Fucking hate white boards. I think the thing I hate the most is that it's impossible to insert lines. When I code, I generally edit all over the place, with a white board you can't do do that.

I can't tell if this is serious or not...I love it.

I think if you're writing code on a whiteboard, you may be doing it wrong.

Tell that to the interviewers.

OK what is it for then?

Diagramming? To-do lists? Math?

doodling writing funny quotes giant reminders meetings schedules announcements

Why not use a piece of paper?

A whiteboard is much easier to erase and reuse.

Replying to OP: because you want to share it with a group of people who are in a room with you.

Lists, graphs, wire frames, UI mockups, brainstorming, IP-addresses, guest WIFI login credentials, sketches of Rick and Morty ...

Basically anything you would use a notebook with pen and paper for in order to extend your working memory, but you want to share with others. Definitely not (non-pseudo) code longer than three or four lines.

Some use cases:

- simple sketch of a user interface

- technical diagrams, like for showing how a data structure is implemented, or the (basic!) messages sent between client and server, or the architecture of your network

- working out examples, like drawing the chain of events that leads to something breaking due to a bug, or a simple example illustrating what you're saying

- very short code (3 lines good, 10 lines bad)

A whiteboard can be a tool to help you explain things. It should be used to augment what you're saying in words. It's very hard to put a diagram in someone's head using words, but much easier if you can draw on a whiteboard.

You're right, though, that things on a whiteboard should be kept very simple. Lots of code, or very large diagrams, are liable to turn into a mess.

I would argue that you’re not really supposed to write code on a whiteboard, especially not long enough chunks that you would hate editing. If you must write code on a whiteboard, try keeping it to pseudo-code, the details of which you can gloss over. And then you won’t hate the whiteboard so much.

No white board interview happens in pseudo code.

If they give you a whiteboard instead of a computer, writing correct code with minimal editing is part of the interview process. You should direct your hate to the interviewers, not to the tool.

This is the normal interview, lol who are you kidding.

i had to laugh at the hilarity of the idea.

i did that with todo lists. i'd rewrite them multiple times to remove done items and add new ones, and reorder them.

Start writing ex commands. That way it’s append only.

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