Message Center

I still have some touching up to do, but I wanted to share my new kitchen message center with you all. This is another one of those vast walls like the one where I just did the Family Photo Gallery Wall which I've had a hard time figuring out what to put here. I wanted to do a giant chalkboard, but because it's such a large space I thought it might look like a black hole. I also knew that I wanted to have my wooden whale that my husband had a woodworker friend of ours make for me years ago hang on this wall. So I decided that I would do a series of frames with a variety surfaces in them that we could use to keep our family organized and then hang them like a gallery wall.
I had been looking for inexpensive frames for a while and finally found some that I could use at a tag sale a few weeks ago. I think the 4 frames cost me all of $6 plus the cans of spray primer and paint I bought to paint them. I went to Home Depot to buy chalkboard paint and was pleasantly surprised to find that you can now get Rustoleum Chalkboard Paint tinted to 12 different colors. It seemed wrong to not take advantage of this and so I had mine tinted to chocolate brown which works nicely with the barn red color of my kitchen. I was also going to pick up a can of magnetic primer so that I could make the chalkboard magnetic when I saw that they had Rustoleum Dry Erase Paint! The man told me it was a brand new item and seeing as I had just done a post on IdeaPaint last week, I couldn't help myself and had to try it. And since both the magnetic primer and the dry erase paint were about $20 per can, and I was trying to keep it inexpensive I nixed the magnetic primer. I bought a piece of MDF that my husband cut to fit each frame and painted onto those instead of directly onto the wall. This worked fine for the chalkboard paint and the dry erase paint took fine to it, but I think the next time I would use a piece of plexiglass or something smoother for a better finish for the dry erase paint. The cork came from an old corkboard that my husband cut down to fit the frame, but you can also buy sheets of it at most superstores. I may end up rearranging it a little bit. I feel like it's a little crowded and maybe a little too low, but I also wanted my kids to be able to reach it so for now I'm going to live with it like this for a while. Overall, I'm quite happy with how it turned out.