Sorry, are we calling them inspiration boards now? This is the laziest DIY inspiration board ever.
Remember the dark days before Pinterest? God, we were all savages then, with our scissors and folders and disgusting piles of magazines that contained, at best, one good recipe and some now-ironic article about how to organize your apartment better. I used to keep a actual scrapbook full of pictures I saved and printed out on paper, then attached to other paper with a glue stick. And no, I’m not talking about pictures of vacation or my friends (that’s what Photobucket was for), I’m of course talking about pictures of furniture in strangers’ homes. If Apartment Therapy posted a cute desk setup I wanted to remember, I had to worry about things like printer ink and finding a pair of scissors. It was pure barbarism. No wonder I spent so much of my 20’s drunk and anxious.
Those are some circa-2005 scrapbook pages. I mean, can you even imagine? (And now I’m having horrible flashbacks to that weird time when I was obsessed with chartreuse. Gross.)
So what I’m saying is, I love Pinterest. Lately, though I’ve been getting a weird itch to start printing stuff out again. It probably has a little to do with the fact that for the first time in years I have a functional, awesome printer (Canon Pixma MG7500, which is inexplicably discontinued) –is it just me or did society go through this weird blip where nobody had printers, then everybody had printers, and now nobody has printers again? My boyfriend works at a doctor’s office that doesn’t have a printer. I can’t tell you what an unspeakable luxury it is to be able to print out Amazon return labels in my own home.
Also, I have an official capital-P Project that I’m sort of working on, so while Pinterest is awesome for gathering every idea I kind of like, it’s not ideal for sorting through the ideas I LOVE or the things I’ve finally pulled the trigger on. Plus you can’t make pictures bigger and that’s, like, totally key sometimes.
So at 2 am this Saturday, I had some pre-2010 flash of inspiration and remembered that bulletin boards totally used to be a thing. (They probably still are, but I don’t get out much.) In the interest of not having my living room/office/woodshop look too much like a college dorm, I dug through my closet to find some stuff to make something that’s hopefully a little cuter than a standard corkboard-in-a-frame.
Supplies:
- 5mm plywood underlayment (~$8 for a 4’x4′ sheet, just have the store cut it to whatever dimensions you want) (if you can’t find any pretty veneer in the underlayment section, look for “project panels,” which are nicer and around the same price
- paint–I used a leftover Sherwin Williams sample, but I also love Apple Barrel craft paints
- cork shelf liner–this stuff seriously has SO MANY uses
- the best, most amazing paintbrush in the entire world that I use for literally everything
- masking tape
- gold washi tape if you’re feeling fancy
- if you’re feeling extra fancy, some brass nails from this insanely handy picture-hanging kit
Steps:
Figure out what size you want your cork portion to be, then cut it out with scissors and stick it on the plywood. Don’t worry about it being too perfect, because whatever you end putting up on it will cover weird edges.
Make some tape lines and slap some paint in the plywood. Peel the tape up right away otherwise your edges will get messed up.
Jazz your shit up with some sparkly washi tape and nail it to the wall!
Extra credit: sand the edges if they’re particularly splinter-y.
Now print out some garbage and pin it up and enjoy knowing how much better you are than all those commoners with their terrible white boards with chronically dried-up markers. If you don’t have anything to pin up yet, may I suggest some ridiculous dog pictures? That’s totally what I’m going to do with the small one I made for the tutorial.
