Backyard Hockey Rink

Every year, in my neighbor's yard we put up a 30' x 60' hockey rink for the kids to skate on. The construction is always the same, 2 x 12s lap nailed together and a huge plastic liner that we buy at a local builders supply. Fill it with a hose and wait for Mother Nature to do her work...she really defines whether it is a good or bad year. We're probably the only people in Cleveland hoping for long, very cold sustained periods of weather. The biggest key to success is finding as level an area of ground as possible, 2" to 4" of water freezes pretty quickly. For a Zamboni, we have a home made model I made out of an old wagon which works pretty well, but a quick skim with snow shovels and laying a running hose on it and wiggling it back and forth like a snake lays a uniform 1/4" of water down and works well too. It's lots of fun and quite easy to do, plus you can reuse the lumber year after year.

The $77 Full-Wall Dry Erase Board

We moved into the new office a couple of months ago, and while we downsized overall, our conference room is much larger. Two of the walls are 17 feet and the other is 22. Instead of hanging a bunch of the store bought (read expensive, $99 for a 4'x6' board) dry erase boards, we all decided it would be cool if we could cover one linear wall with a white board. I looked into the wallpaper that is dry erasable, etc. Wow, what sticker shock. A 4' wide roll of wallpaper that would cover 17' was literally going to be hundreds and hundreds of dollars. So I search the internet for solutions and found a lot of people suggesting 1/4" melamine. Well, it works. Check it out. Here's all it took for our 17' wall. Three sheets of 1/4" 4'x8' melamine $36, four tubes of all purpose Liquid Nails $10, three 1"x2"x8' pieces of pine for the rail/marker holder $18, one 8' edge band and one 8' joiner band for the melamine (this is available right next to where the melamine is sold in the home center, they are simple plastic channel strips) $5, screws for the rail $8. Total cost about $77. I routed a simple channel in the pine rail pieces so the markers wouldn't roll off and put a coat of poly on the pine. Found the studs in the wall and screwed the pine rail to the wall. I then cut two 4.5' pieces of melamine (these would be the ends, I wanted a full 8' sheet in the middle so there was no seam right in the middle of the room). I rested the melamine on the rail, tipped it down, gooed up the back with liquid nails and starting at one end tipped melamine up and stuck it to the wall. The end band and the joiner band slid easily on the edges as I went. All very simple and quick. This is a great solution for anyone who wants a big dry erase area. It's about $1.13 a square foot when it's all said and done versus $4.15 a square foot for store bought boards. Way more economical and looks much better than those lame metal framed store bought boards.