Make it bigger!
That’s right, it’s bigger!
I just built this thing like half an hour ago!

Neil Patrick Harris – 2013 Tony Awards

Since David Willis has been offering magnets as premiums in his Dumbing of Age Kickstarter campaigns, I’ve been getting all of them. First, they lived on my refrigerator. Then I bought a 2-ft x 3-ft magnetic whiteboard to display them. This hung in my office, but then I moved to another house, and I stopped having my own office, so the whiteboard was stuffed in a corner in the basement puppet workshop.

Then two things happened: I got the magnets with Willis’ TENTH book… and I finally got a new closet for Christmas.

A what? Ok, let me go back to when we moved into our new house. It was much larger than our old house, and the master bedroom had two walk-in closets. My wife’s closet had lots of hanging rods and some shelves, and the closet I took had lots of things to hang clothes on, but it wasn’t particularly well installed, and it was coming out of the sheet rock. Within a month, I only had one rack to hang clothes on.

I hung clothes on the one rack I had, and piled things on the floor. It was a mess. I kept saying I wanted to re-do the closet, but like a lot of home projects I talk about, I kept finding things that were “more important”. Finally, my wife and one of her friends went to IKEA and bought me a whole closet system, and the boxes were sitting under the tree on Christmas morning!

If anyone is asking “Is that a chair in your closet?”, yes, it is a chair. I don’t have much personal space in this house, so I wanted my closet to be a little refuge all my own. Also, when I was in elementary school, my parents got me The Lord of the Rings trilogy in paperback for Christmas, and I found out about it in November, and I spent the weeks leading up to Christmas hiding in my parents’ closet and reading with a flashlight. I have fond memories of hiding in that closet and reading, and I wanted to recapture that magic. Besides, sometimes it’s nice to have a chair to sit on when you’re getting dressed.

Anyway, back to my magnets. Now that I had this space, I wanted to fill it not just with clothes, but with stuff that was special to me. Those magnets fit the bill. But the whiteboard wouldn’t fit, and I had outgrown the whiteboard anyway. I wanted to make my own solution.

But I’m a virtuous programmer, and one of the three virtues of a great programmer is LAZINESS (the other two are impatience and hubris):

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book.

Larry Wall, Programming Perl

A lazy programmer doesn’t re-invent the wheel if someone else has already done so. So I did what everybody does these days: I googled it. I skipped over all the videos (I didn’t want a step by step, I wanted something I could skim for ideas), and I found this post: DIY Magnet Board.

I modified the design a little, but I wound up using the same sheet metal they used in the post. I wanted the board to fit in the space between my door and the other wall, and that section of wall was only 19 inches wide, so I picked 1-in x 2-in square unfinished pine for the wood backing (I got two 8-ft and one 4-ft length) and two sheets of the 24-in x 3-ft galvanized steel sheet metal. I made a 7-ft 8-in x 18-in wood frame, and I snipped the sheet metal sheets in half so I had four 2-ft x 18-in sections, and then I trimmed four inches off the one I attached to the bottom. Since I’m a theater geek, I used gaffers tape to tape down all the edges on the sheet metal so there wouldn’t be any sharp edges.

And voilà!

I like it. I have almost twice the space that I had on the whiteboard, and it’s in my own space again like it was when I had an office in the old house. It feels nice.