So we are decorating the house.  One of the rooms has a the heights of the family at various ages, in pencil on the wall.  It has a lot of sentimental value and I am reluctant to paint over it.  I could of course just not decorate that part of the wall , but ideally waht I would liek to do is to get a season plank of light wood and transfer the heights to it.  At firs I thought of using tracimg paper, but I wondered if I could ‘scan’ the wall and somehow transfer it to the plank.  I found hand held scanners but am not sure if they are suitable.

So a question for STW – any other ideas?

Can’t you just measure them and then mark the plank? It’s height for date that is sentimental, no?  Varnish said plank and screw onto repainted wall  you can take it with you if you move  add a hook at an appropriate height for s New functionality

We have the same door of truth where I mark all my kids, nephews and nieces. When they visit. Mine have stopped growing now.

A photograph sort of does the job of a scanner. If you can’t get far enough back to get it all in one shot you can stitch several photos together. Would require a bit of photo-shop tidying up.

To transfer to the wood some sign printing / reprographics companies  do large scale ‘direct printing’ straight onto solid materials rather than onto paper on a roll

Take a photo square on, provided you’ve got a sensible resolution and good lighting there should be no issues.

I’d be looking at converting it to a black and white line drawing and then getting it laser etched into a sheet of wood.

You could try a photo scanning app on your phone. It should take multiple photos and stitch them together automagically. eg Google PhotoScan.

Though not sure if it is limited in the maximum size or resolution etc. And would have to make sure the scale is correct.

Four options (other than some of the ones covered above) spring to mind. Personally anything other than the first two seems needlessly complicated to me, but hey, you mught like them.

Mechanical- buy a pantograph. Engineers tracing. Copy directly onto your piece of wood.

If you really want it digital for posterity or to get something cool printed/machine cut etc ..

Basic digital- take photos of each marking. Combine on computer the correct distance apart.

Slightly more complicated digital- use the highest resolution camera you have from a decent distance away, aim at the middle of the area you want to capture. Add a reference square at the top and bottom. Put photo into Photoshop (or similar) and undistort based on squares.

‘Massively overcomplicated but you might want to learn a new skill’ digital- download a free trial of Agisoft Photoscan, learn the basics of photogrammetry, take pictures of the area of interest, render, then export an orthophoto based on the plane of the wall. It’s good enough for aerial mapping, it should be good enough for you!

Followed by –

We had the same situation.  I just taped around the markings and painted around it.  Sure, you end up with a rectangle of different paint colours over the years but that just makes more of a feature of it.