I am not a natural planner. I want to be a planner, so badly, but I’m truly a fly-the-seat-of-my-pantser. My “go with the flow” attitude can make planning a struggle. My sister on the other hand, is like the ultimate planner! She has a blog devoted to conquering your chaos, and even a membership to help you do it. She’s always been put-together and bossy and we love her for it. She wrote this blog post about why every home needs a command center which I read and thought, “damnit. We need a command center.”
Things take forever to ship here to Japan and large stuff won’t ship regardless. I also just try really hard not to buy extra things when I don’t have to. We had this huge spare dry erase board lying around, so I decided to try it! I had extra cricut vinyl and everything too, so it just seemed worth it to try and make my own.
PS – this post contains shoppable Amazon Affiliate links (see full disclosure at the end of post).
A quick honest word
Listen.
I’m always going to be honest with you, even if it means eating some humble pie. I can’t stand when people fake that they’re an expert in everything. I don’t know why people do that. I consider myself pretty crafty, but that doesn’t mean I can do everything perfectly.
This is a DIY post. I did make a calendar and command center. It also took me approximately 3 hours to complete it and I wanted to throw my cricut out of the window.
3 hours is a HUGE amount of time when you can only work when your child is sleeping. I spent both naps one day on this. I’m cringing thinking about it.
There are really pretty dry erase calendars for like $10-15 out there. Just saying.
If you’re still interested because you want a custom board, the supplies and how-to are below!
Planning
I knew I wanted two months on the board, because if I can only see one month I won’t plan ahead enough. I still had room for other sections because it is huge, so I added a menu section to start meal planning and also so Edgar can stop asking me what’s for dinner (Kelsie has words on that, too). I also put a Megan and Edgar section where we can write notes and then a goals section for family goals. Pinterest has lots of family command center suggestions to start brainstorming what you need at yours.
Supplies:
You will need the following:
- A dry erase board
- Ruler or yardstick
- Thin and Normal Sharpie
- Cricut machine or other vinyl cutter
- Permanent vinyl – I used one sheet of gold metallic I had on hand.
- Transfer tape
- Dry erase markers
- Wet-erase markers
- Scissors
- Herbal stress-relief tea
- Patience
Did you know?
My pilot husband taught me that wet-erase markers/pens are way better than dry erase and also you can use dry erase markers to remove sharpie from dry erase surfaces! I had no idea. You just draw all over the sharpie with the dry erase and then wipe away! This is why I just went ahead and drew lines on my board with sharpie. It may wear off with time but it would be easy to touch-up. If we decide to buy nice calendars later I can scrape my vinyl off and use a dry erase marker to buff out the sharpie and get our plain board back. It’s like magic–try it!
How-to make the command center calendar
- Measure your board and decide how many sections you will need.
- Using a piece of scrap paper, draw out your dimensions and measurements. Divide your calendar section into even spaces and 5 rows for dates, plus an extra for the days of the week and potentially month (someone may have forgotten about the month but it’s fine, everything is fine).
- Using a ruler and thin sharpie, measure and make a spaced dotted line to guide your regular sharpie lines
- Triple check your dots, then line the ruler or yardstick up and use the thicker sharpie to make your dividing lines.
- Open cricut design space and type in your words, checking measurements against the boxes already created on your board.
- I used my favorite sans-serif font and spaced the letters at 3.0 and 4.0
- Lay your vinyl down, load, and cut
- Tweeze the excess vinyl. *The reason it took me so long was because my cricut was cutting the vinyl too deep, which made it really difficult to properly tweeze all the little letters. I think you can avoid this by calibrating your blade every now and then which I am too lazy to do. But would probably save you a lot of headache. I had to repeat this step twice because I lost a few letters.
- Have a sip of tea
- Lay your transfer tape down and then lift everything off of the mat. If you prefer peeling first or any other order, do what’s comfortable for you.
- Cut your words out of your sheet
- Peel the backs off and use the transfer tape to place words on the board
- Clap for yourself
- Hang it on the wal
- Fill in dates and things
- Tell your spouse to look at it when they ask what’s for dinner
Final verdict
If you’re really efficient with your cricut (read: if you are a cricut wizard) and have the materials on hand like I did, this project will probably take you less than an hour time. If you’re not efficient with a cricut, order these $15 calendars instead. I wish I had ordered the calendars after all the time I spent on it. lol. But I do like my custom sections at the bottom. Plus then when a month finished you could move your current month up and erase the old one, write the new one, and move it down. I think that may drive me crazy about my board. But then I wouldn’t have this fun post for you. So, silver linings! Stay tuned to see if we use the command center and if I cave and buy real calendars later. 😂
