A Simple Ledge for a White Board From a Scrap of 2x4... the PreRamble

A while back almost more or less three years ago a bit more than less I think, I was in a car accident and rolled a truck at 60 mph with a trailer and a ton of Quickcrete and bumped my head while I was halfway though building a house.

I'm not sure if halfway is correct but I had it dried in and had the top two levels finished on the outside with siding and the shingles on.

For the record when I began the house I intended it to be bricked top to bottom but this all started because my wife found a postage stamp sized photo of a house she liked and asked if I could build one that looked like it on the lot we had next door.

I began drawing her floorplans until she said ok but I didn't realize she literally wanted it just like the picture which meant siding not brick.

It was just as I was putting the Decking down on top of the first level when I found out her wishes and since the bottom level had to be brick because the lot slopes, I over hung the main floor 2 inches so my siding would line up flush to the bottom row of bricks.

I didn't want a big ledge around the house's perimeter to collect water every time it rained plus I just think it looks better that way.

I finished the house.

It took two years instead of a few months because of the wreck and needing to learn to walk and talk and think all over again but having the house to work on probably literally saved my life.

I highly recommend it as a form of therapy.

I know how lucky I am but still it's hard to actually get things done when I tend to forget if I look away and although most people can remember 7 things for a length of time I'm really pushing it to remember 3 things if I have to remember it long enough to drive 4 miles to WinnDixie...

Again a reason for a white board is I lose my notebooks but if it's screwed to the wall it's hard to misplace.

You learn to cope and make yourself notes and when I was working on finishing the house I found it helpful to put a WB up in the foyer and everyday I'd write the Task of the Day on it and when I forgot what I was working on I could still remember to go back to the foyer and see what I had written.

I'm not nearly as bad as that anymore but I'm fixing to have surgery on my shoulder and I was trying to think of something I could do for six weeks with an arm in a sling so I didn't get cabin fever and came upon the idea that if I finished out the computer room which is actually a bedroom and made some more business cards I might pick up some side jobs repairing computers and I do need to find someway to earn a living.

I don't have the attention span to run a real business again but I am pretty sure I could fix a computer or two a week without much trouble if I had some practice plus in general the more things I do to think the more my noggin seems to function better. I remembered the white board and how handy it was back then but I also remembered how frustrating it could be to be standing there without a pen in sight and no matter how many times I tied a string to a pen within a few weeks tops it would vanish....

White Board's should come with a Chalk Ledge!

Seriously I'll quit kidding around and get to the point.

To make this you need a white board obviously, some wood glue a few finishing nails about 2 inches long and a piece of 2x4 about an inch longer than the width of your whiteboard depending if your a horizontal or vertical type white boarder.

A belt sander will also be useful to have and you more or less need a table saw to make two rip cuts.

I actually needed to make trip to Ace in town to get some 2 x 4's for the The Top Secret Tornado Bunker in the Crawlspace Project so I got to pick through what they had and I found a piece of lodgepole with very few knots and a nice straight grain. Unless you're going to put this somewhere that appearance matters any scrap will do.

Basically you just set up your table saw to rip a cut as wide as the white board you chose and set the blade so it cuts a grove a half inch deep. Rip the board on the thinner 1.5 inch wide side, then readjust the fence to cut a half inch wide rip and with the previously ripped side against the fence and the wide side closest to the first rip facing down.

You end up with a groove that should be a pretty snug fit to the whiteboard and a strip about 3/4 by 1/2 left over. Use the belt sander to smooth up the faces of the 2x3 and the thin strip, and stationary belt sander works best, then glue the thin strip to the side of the 2x4 opposite longways to the groove for the WB. Use a few brads to hold it in place then once again use the belt sander to smooth up what will be the face of the chalk ledge and then I used the disk side of the belt sander to sand the ends flush.

I realized I made a mistake at this point and I should have made the ledge a half inch or so longer than the WB so allow for losing some length when sanding the ends so if you're the type to sand and finish things leave yourself some leeway.

At this point I glued the white board into the channel in the board and just used wood glue but this would be a good time to use something like liquid nails since the edge of the WB is pretty smooth and wood glue likes porous surfaces.

I shot about a dozen trim nails through the WB from behind at a slight angle to be sure they stayed inside the 2x4 instead of shooting out the edge of it and put a nail at each end perpendicular to the others through the wood and into the WB making sure once again the nail was lined up to stay inside what is essentially the frame for the WB then wiped the excess glue off it and screwed it to the wall.

The ledge is wide enough to hold the eraser and a few pens.

I intentionally left the ends uncapped to make it easy to clean dust from and it took longer to write this than it did to make...