DIY TARDIS Cork Board – Doctor Who Office

Want to geek up your office? Here’s a Doctor Who DIY TARDIS cork board. It’s quick and easy to make, and pretends to be geek art if you don’t have anything to stick to it.

I (Kat) moved day-job offices last week (same company, just moved to a different office space), and desperately needed a little cork board on which to stick reminders and whatnot. At the same time, our tiny Our Nerd Home office (which is actually a tiny, tiny nook in our living room, and another tiny, tiny nook in our garage) is also having an overhaul. So yeah, we’ve had office DIY projects on our minds. We started with this Doctor Who DIY TARDIS inspired cork board.

First off, has everyone seen THIS? It’s an office from the Scattermom blog. To clarify, it’s a Doctor Who office. This is amazing, and if we had the space, we’d do it in a heartbeat. The TARDIS door, the nebula, the whole thing. Unfortunately, our home office needs to stay pretty portable, so we keep everything small in scale.

We started with a square piece of cork board, like this. Initially we were just going to paint a TARDIS on it, but then we saw this TARDIS sign pillow from ThinkGeek, and decided to model our board after that instead. We picked up a roll of cork (who knew that’s a thing?) from Joann – it looks like this. With the Joann email coupon, I think it was maybe $4. Grab some glue, TARDIS-ish blue acrylic paint, white acrylic paint, and a black Sharpie while you’re there, and you’re good to go.

We painted the main cork board with one coat of blue, and let it dry.

Then we cut out a square of the cork roll, a little smaller than the main board. That one got a quick coat of white. We did the paint a little haphazardly, for a semi-distressed look. When you first unroll it, the cork roll is wavy and weird, but once you glue it to the blue board it’s fine. It’s also VERY thin cork, so I doubt you want to use it on its own.

After gluing the white smaller square to the blue main square, we HAND WROTE the lettering of the TARDIS sign in pencil. Yep, by hand. If you’re worried about it coming out messy, you can pick up some letter stencils at the craft store. We didn’t mind the handmade look for this one. Especially since… well, it’s handmade.

We went over the pencil letters with a Sharpie, starting out really lightly, then gradually thickening the lines out.

Done! We almost wanted to leave it as is and add it to our geek gallery wall, but that kind of defeats the purpose. 🙂

We can’t decide if we like it as much as the 8-bit Heart Magnetic Chalkboard, but the TARDIS sign was definitely easier (no jigsaw required).

What do you think? Do you geek up your office? We have a couple more office projects coming up – we’re working on a Claptrap trash bin (Borderlands!), and another comic book decoupage project, since our Mid Century Comic Book Table was fun to make.