I dream of white boards..........

Back in the day, I used to get sent over to Foster's office in advance of our presentations to set up. Their meeting rooms had floor to ceiling metal panels allowing me to 'pin' our drawings up with the magnets provided.

No white board has ever been big enough for me since. If it's not full wall size it just won't do. So not surprisingly I have been getting rather frustrated since what was available internally could best be described as 'titchy'.

Before

Having been moved into a new office whilst away on site, to celebrate my return I decided to indulge my whims. A large section of one wall was the backs of roller cupboards from the next room, over 2m wide and 2m high. The tacky bits of tape all over them showed that 'pin up' had been attempted in the past, but not with any style. What I needed was basically white, dry-wipable, magnetic wall paper! 

A bit of web searching led me to Abel Magnets Ltd of Sheffield. They specialise in all sorts of sheet magnetic products. With their advice I bought a roll of 0.5mm White Dry White Flex O Metal (great name!). 

This is about 600mm wide and you can hang it on a firm flat surface in the same way you do wall paper, using industrial strength spray mount bought from Abel. A 2m long piece would be quite heavy to accurately hang on your own, but my wife came into the office at the weekend and in 40 minutes we had finished a neat job.

After

A few detailed points:

1. Health and Safety: The freshly cut edge of Flex O Metal can deliver a pretty mean paper cut! You have been warned.
2. The spray mount came out quite stringy and initially left small undulations under the surface. These seem to be smoothing out with time.
3. The magnets I bought from Abel do hold paper sheets on the wall, but you have to be careful with them - I'll look for some larger ones that may stick better one day.
4. The cleaning spray from Abel doesn't seem great - any stubborn marks do come off wonderfully with Sticky Stuff Remover from the supermarket.

Total cost for the white board of my dreams was around £120. I'm very, very happy and lots of people have asked how I did it. And now they know!