Nestling: Fall List :: Kitchen Command Center & and Ikea Hack

Hi there!

Yesterday I showed you my little "Fall List" and even got to cross of an item:

Next up, was our Kitchen "Command Center". We moved into this house in the middle of a school year, and things were ca-razy. Paper work all over the place. Case in point: a week after our son began his new school, we received a packet for registration for this school year, due back by the end of that week. I placed it aside to look over 'later'. ...I found it again a month after it's due date :)

Needless to say, I made it a priority to come up with a system. So, I bought some cheap hanging baskets {with the intention to fix them up}, and hung up a chalkboard we had bought months before {and never hung} at a Goodwill for $2.99.

The problem? Besides being BORING and UGLY, the system just was not working!

Obviously :)

In theory it had everything we needed: storage, magnetic board, pin board, files....but it's boring "office-y" look drove me crazy. Then one day, I ran across this image on a link party I linked up to {gotta love blogs!!}:

via Intentional Adventures

And it suddenly dawned on me. Gallery wall. Part pretty, part functional. Duh...why didn't I think of that???

Now that I had a plan, I knew the first thing I had to do was redo that chalkboard of ours.

{if anyone is wondering, that rambling on the right has to do with our son's speech therapy :)}

I loved the purpose of it (and definitely the price!), but hated this odd, empty space below. It never seemed to serve a purpose except to act as a dropping ground for random things. Plus, it is angled.

For the past year, I have thought it was clearly just missing the bottom part. Then, this past month, I walked into Ikea and found this same chalkboard....still with nothing on the bottom!! What.the.heck.

I began this project with absolutely NO idea with what I would do for the bottom. I just knew that I at least had the inspiration for the chalkboard:

This is a board I found at HomeGoods, for $30. I loved the details with the days on it:

And for the size, the price wasn't too bad. But I had this other piece waiting at home, and I could just hear Jason's voice if I brought home a new one! Know what I mean?

So, painting it was! I used some cream colored paint we had leftover from some other projects {read: free!}, and covered over the chalkboard part with cereal boxes and painters tape.

I bought a pack of cheap, small letter stencils at Michael's. I used painters tape to create a straight line to measure where the top of all my letters should start.

Using a small foam brush, I dabbed on some of the paint I had leftover from a sample of paint we had.

Since I am impatient (and you need to wait for the paint to dry before you can do the next letter), I jumped around a bit.

I have stenciled quite a few things, and this one turned out the worst (true story). It was really hard to keep the small stencils flush against the board. And even though I measured equal distances between all the days, I was still left with a gap between Friday and Saturday.

:::sigh:::

So, in an attempt to make it look intentional, I added a heart between the days by cutting one out of tape:

And, you know what? I kinda like it.

I then used some of the leftover fabric I had from our banquette, and glued it to some poster board (with all purpose adhesive spray) and then glued that into the spot below.

This I LOVED. Already better, right???

I wanted to do something more with the space, something functional. So I took four of our smaller mason jars and filled them up with the supplies that we use for this area all the time- thumb tacks, paper clips, magnets, and clips.

They fit in the spot perfectly, but I wanted to make sure there was no way that one could just fall out (say when a certain small person is having a tantrum and kicking the wall below it....not that any of my kids would do that!), so I glued on magnets to the fabric and then onto the jars with hot glue.