An 8’x4′ whiteboard can cost hundreds of dollars commercially. That’s no good. We like whiteboards, but not spending money.

Here’s our inexpensive work-around. Buy an 8’x4′ slab of white hardboard panel at Lowe’s or Home Depot. Each board costs about $13. This product is made for cheap showers, mud rooms, laundry rooms, etc., in order to be water-resistant and minimize staining.

We didn’t want a single 8’x4′ whiteboard, preferring 3 large whiteboards: one 3’x4′ and two 2.5’x4′. Lowe’s was happy to cut the board with their saw for us. Their saw is not appropriate if you need super-precise measurements, but it works for something like this.

We hung one whiteboard in the kitchen for Maria to keep a weekly menu and shopping list. We hung one in the living room near the stairs (shown above) for any group brainstorming or Pictionary. And the biggest one went up in the office for me to write math on.

The hardboard seems to approximate an expensive whiteboard pretty well. Most dry erase markers write and erase well. Here is the above picture half-erased:

We use normal dry erase markers on the boards. We’ll probably put a tray under the boards to hold them at some point.

I’m sure you could get fancy and put a boarder on the whiteboards. We decided to just screw the boards straight to the wall. Close-up of the screw in the corner:

You can see that the saw at Lowe’s will leave a bit of a rough edge where the board is cut. It’s not very noticeable in person, though.

The white boards have been up for about a week and are working well. I’ve heard that the hardboard tends to stain over time, so we bought two 8’x4′ panels, cut to the same size, from Lowe’s. So in a year or two, if the boards are stained, we can easily replace them. Alternatively, if we like them so much that we want more, we can hang more whiteboards.

I got this idea from a post at lifehacker.