When I was re-designing our guest bedroom I knew that the space would also house a small desk that I could as a mini office if they mood should ever strike. Because of that I wanted a giant bulletin board to tack up all of my pictures.
This board from Ballard Designs was the right size, but the wrong colors and oh yea $499 so that wasn’t happening.
I then remember an old DIY project in a Martha Stewart Living magazine that I had rescued from my neighbors trash pile and so began my Homasote board project.
With a quick trip to Home Depot we were set to begin.
If you wander down your insulation aisle at your local home improvement store you will be met with a big stack of homasote.
For $23 and some change I bought home a massive piece of Homasote. Now you can ask the kind folks there to cut it down to size or you can bring it home, use a box cutter to score your size and then snap it off just like dry wall.
* We cut it at home with our table saw, because we had one available and let me tell you it’s MESSY! Paper bits fly all over the place.
I knew I wanted it framed so we went down a couple of aisles and voila!
It was already primed and only 82 cents a foot so we cut our pieces to size and continue to the register. The rest of our supplies were already at home.
We decided to secure our memo board to the wall with wall anchors. I didn’t want them to show which is why we got the mouldings. That would cover all of our anchors.
After we cut our piece to size we made some marks on the homasote for where we wanted the anchors placed and the height of the of the moulding.
Make same measurements on wall and drill in your anchors.
You can then go and attach your fabric. I used the same white canvas that was used on the pillows.
I could still see a bit of the homasote brown color peeking thru the white so I added a thin layer of quilt batting to fix that. No need to spray it on. Just lay it on the board and wrap your fabric around it. If you like you could staple it into place on the front, because the staples will be covered by the moulding
Once you’ve wrapped it with fabric you can attach trim if you want. Even though I plan on placing pictures up with tacks I wanted to give the fabric a similar look to LULU DK CHANT so I used rick-racking in yellow to do so.
Then you simply place board against wall and drill a screw through the board into the wall anchor.
Since I didn’t want the screws showing we nailed on our trim moulding and we were finished!
It was a very simple project and not too pricey. Cutting the board, drilling the holes, wrapping it in fabric and attaching it to the wall really takes no time at all.
What took us the longest time was figuring out placing the trim on the fabric. I only had a limited amount of it so we needed to be careful before we cut each piece.
Once that was done attaching the trim was also a breeze.
We also didn’t do everything at once. The cut homasote and painted trim pieces had been sitting in my house for over a month waiting for me to get to that project.
If you have any technical questions ask away and I’ll have Jon help me with answers this evening!
Hope you all have a great weekend!
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Great idea, love it!!
Makes a great statement on your guestroom walls- its going to look even better once you start filling it with all your memories.
Have a good weekend!
Thanks for the tutorial. I need to get on one of these. so needed right now!
Great idea – a memo board done large.
Thank you so much. I'd never heard of homasote. I've got 2 projects where I need a giant tack board (a backer to our dart board to protect the wall, and mounting a poster-sized map to keep track of our travels), but I've been put off by the cost of large bulletin boards. I'll finally get to do them now.
This makes me so jealous! I wanted to do this same project, but my Home Depot doesn't carry homasote. I finally found some at a local builder's, but because of OSHA they won't cut it for me. 🙁
yours turned out super pretty! Great statement piece!
I love it! It looks great!
I love your DIYs. And the blue and yellows together. Keep them coming!
Gresat look! Love the yellow rick rack!
xo,
cristin
This looks great. Lots of drama, lots of functionality.
Looking at it I wonder if this might also work as a headboard.
What are your thoughts?
Hi! I saw your room makeover on DesignSponge and love it! Thank you for your post and I love the board! The dark blue and yellow are perfect contrasts. Can you tell me exactly how you attached the trim to the board? I would love to do something like this for my place.
I love this!! I may need to try this in my office!!
I love it. Such a great idea!
Perfection, and many thanks for passing on this great idea. I think there isn't one of us that wouldn't love one of those in our home. Great Valentines weekend to you xx
You and Bryn did inspiration boards this week! Loving them both! Happy Valentines Camila!
I never saw that issue of MS, what a clever idea to use homasote!
I still lust over those Ballard bulletin boards, but seriously – $500 for cork???
I truly love how yours is custom-made to size and color, anyway.
Thanks for the how-to!!
very handy you are.
You did such a great job! thanks for sharing!
Looks great!!!!!
great job!
Wonderful! Great job.
fun! great job!
Thanks for the step by step. Will file this away for future. It was one of my favorite features of your guest room!
I love this – I have been thinking of doing something like this for my office and now I have the instructions! Thankyou for sharing.
That room has so many beautiful colors…swoon. I love the way the board looks. As I read on I didn't know it was going to have such a POW factor. Great job!
I so love that you did this, because several years ago when Martha Stewart did this I told my husband about it. We went to I swear it was Home Depot and both my husband and the guy at the store had never heard of homasote. I am so showing my hubby this so I can say HA in his face and then give him a kiss and ask him to make one for me, lol!
Love it!
So, what is Homasote, exactly? Do you think you could paint it like a canvas?
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I didn’t know they had a special type of board for the project. That alone was worth reading about. Live the idea of using the moulding to cover the screws/nails. Thank for sharing!
How did you attach the trim? This is the part that’s tripping me up.
All the instructions I’ve found online for this project cover the homasote in fabric. Anyone know if you can just paint it? Thanks!
You can try and paint it, but I think it will require a lot of coats. Homasote is just compressed paper so it really eats up the paint. Hope that helps.
Not sure how you attach the board to a plaster and lathe wall. I want to use a 4 x 8 sheet, so it may be heavy.