Designing and making a giant plywood pegboard might be niche; it was not easy to find information about it. Here's what I've learned from building a plywood pegboard like this.

Problem

The HPL board wall with aluminum frame is not so flattering on video conferences in our home office space.

Furthermore, this is a thin external wall, and HPL is tricky to drill. Adding fixtures onto it will be an irreversible process where a lot can go wrong.

Design

Installation

Due to the special structure around the wall, I realized that I could use the cove to support the pegboards. There's a long slot that runs along the ceiling; inserting the backing of the boards will prevent the board from falling over.

To make the board flush with the ceiling structure, the boards are backed with two long beams that are cut from the same material to act as extra support and the insertion part.

If extra stability is needed, fixing the boards to the cove with brackets, or adding a rail to prevent the feet from sliding forward could help.

Material

15mm regular plywood is used for the project. 18mm makes the board stronger and is quite standard, but the slot is also exactly 18mm, so I chose 15mm to avoid the risk of needing adjustments.

The full name of the material is Kuiper Poplar Plywood. The weight difference between 15mm and 18mm is 1.26kg/m2, at the size of this project, that makes the boards slightly easier to handle.

Dimension

The space is 196cm tall and 170cm wide. It can be split into two boards of 196cm x 85cm.

The hole size was chosen just because it is a nice round number, and I was going for a graphic look with thick dowels. But it turned out 20mm dowels don't fit 20mm holes: the friction is just too high. I had to manually shave a significant amount of material off the dowels. Next time I will try 19mm dowels.

The distance between the holes was chosen by playing around with Auto Layout in Figma... Even if the holes across boards will have an extra centimeter between them, it is not going to be a big problem because the boards are going to be significantly longer.

80mm-deep shelves were chosen because there will be seats in front of the boards, and the boards go quite low. However, 80mm turned out to be tricky in practice: some slightly larger decorations need the shelves to sit further out from the boards. Eventually I just cut the dowels much longer, preparing for a future iteration of shelves with 120mm depth.

Production

Sourcing boards in exactly the right dimensions is quite easy with services like opmaatzagen.nl. But the real challenge is in drilling the holes.

I found a few YouTube videos about making this type of pegboard, such as this comprehensive one from Get Hands Dirty. However, I wasn't ready to invest a few hundred euros in a drill press and Forstner drill bits, plus the time to lay the plan out carefully on the delivered boards.

I eventually found a local service called CNC Zwolle. I sent my drawing over and was happy to find that this option is no more expensive than doing it all myself with the proper equipment.

Learnings and next iteration

• Board Thickness: 15mm is strong enough, 18mm is standard.
• Plywood does visibly bend over time due to changing environment conditions (e.g. temperature, humidity).
• Choose birch plywood for a more refined plywood look. The edge of poplar plywood still has some uneven dark patches that some people might find disturbing. But birch is also denser, so the boards will be heavier.
• Dowels with diameters from 16mm to 19mm seem to be the easiest to source. I found my 20mm dowels on Amazon, but they are significantly more expensive because they are used for building fancy wardrobes.
• I overestimated the number of shelves I needed by 200%. Having 6 shelves around 30cm is already quite sufficient for such large area.
• I will probably consider painting the shelves in a few years.

I still have two more sections that can be filled with these pegboards. I am still thinking about whether to use the same material throughout or add some variation. I am also thinking about a few extra components that can fit onto the pegboard such as a universal hanger for holding headphones, plants, or lamps.

For now it is all back in the ideation phase.