The finished product:
My partner and I recently completed a move. We’re both engineers and use kanban boards at work, so we used one for planning our move. The move went so smoothly, that we wanted to pull this approach into more aspects of our day-to-day life.
So, clearly, we needed a gorgeous kanban board for our new kitchen. The one I have at work is a grungy whiteboard and post-it notes which was absolutely not going to cut it.
The boards were cut and engraved out of full sheets of proofgrade medium maple ply. The tiles were made of orange acryllic.
These first tiles are supposed to be recurring tasks for setting up hangouts with friends, so I added dry-erase tape to keep track of the date we last had a friend over.
The tiles are mounted with velcro, and the boards are hung on the wall with 3M command strips.
Were I going to do this again, I’d make a few changes:
- Smaller tiles.
- Make sure to use the pathfinder option when creating the tile engravings from type (if you look closely, you can see overlaps of letters weren’t engraved).
- I think the HD engraving looks better on acrylic.
- I think mounting the tiles with magnets would look a lot better.
It took a couple hours of design time, a couple hours of laser time, and maybe an hour of assembly. All in all, it was a lot of fun to make, and I think this is going to keep our home management tasks running smoother!