All my friends love whiteboards, because they’re giant nerds. It’s only a good party when somebody starts trying to illustrating a point on the whiteboard. Also, to-do lists you can’t miss.

This isn’t my idea, but it’s good and I thought I’d share it. Home Depot and Lowes sell a material called “thrify white panelling” or “smooth white hardboard”. It’s cheap – mine was about $14 for a 4-foot-by-8-foot sheet. I asked the store staff to cut the panel in half so it would fit in my car, which they did for free.

It’s easily chipped, so watch out if you want it to look flawless.

Then I stuck it to the wall of my studio apartment. I used some kind of drywall anchor to screw it on, with washers, to get a good grip on the material. (I think using a drywall anchor was overkill, and can’t recommend them for renters until I see how cleanly they come out of the wall – so if you have a better low-damage attachment system, maybe try that first. I wasn’t able to get them to stick with Command velcro strips – the strips kept detaching from the panel material – but other people on the internet seem to have found success in this.)

It acts as a whiteboard as-is. Writing gets hard to erase if you leave it up there for a long time, but you can clean it with whiteboard-cleaning-solution, alcohol, or by coloring over the marks with another whiteboard marker and then erasing that. Internet people also report that you can buff the entire surface with turtle wax before hanging it, and this makes it more stain-resistant.

I didn’t do that, and it’s still pretty good, especially for $14.

Let me know if you try this!

(Possibly relevant: Andrew Critch's giant notepad for better thinking)