Magnetic Chalkboard Message Center DIY

I had been toying around with the idea of making a chalkboard message center for our kitchen for awhile, thus one evening when my husband and I were looking for a project to do I brought it up to him. My idea was just to take a large frame, or something of the like, and place a chalkboard painted piece of wood behind it with cork board along the bottom. My husband, on the other hand, decided that it would be much easier to build it all from scratch. How that is easier, I still have no clue. But he is the handyman, so I let him go about building it his way...as long as I got some sort of message center that included a chalkboard out of the deal I was good to go. And to make the whole thing even better as we were checking out at Lowes the cashier told us they make magnetic chalkboard primer! A chalkboard that is magnetic!?!? Sold! ;-) Please excuse my kinda horrible pictures...1.) This is before I got my fancy new DSLR camera and 2.) I'm just a horrible photographer;-)
The first thing my hubby did was take a piece of plywood and mount it to the wall. I am still not convinced this was the easy way to go. He is correct...this large, heavy chalkboard is not going to fall off the wall. But if we ever tire of it we will have some patching to do on the wall where he screwed it in. Then we painted several coats of the chalkboard primer onto the ply wood. The primer only has to sit for about 30 minutes or so per coat. I think we did 3 or 4 coats. We left the bottom unpainted because that is where the cork board, etc were going to go. Then on went the chalkboard paint! The chalkboard paint we used had to sit for 24 hours in between coats or writing on it. Thus it sat like this for a few days:

While the paint was drying my husband measured and cut all of the moulding that would frame the plywood. If this part was left up to me I am pretty sure we would have a significantly lopsided and misaligned mess, which is exactly why I would have just used a frame, haha! Our kitchen colors are red and a sort of robins egg blue color so we painted the frame with some left over wall paint we had used. Our lovely soup can paint stands:

As I mentioned before when I get going on a project I often realize after the fact that I missed a whole bunch of pictures that I should have taken. Thus my next picture is of the finished product. However before we put the framing up on the wall I just took some cork board pieces I had bought and glued them along the bottom corners of the plywood. In between the cork board I took another piece of the cork board and covered it with a thin piece of batting I had and some fabric and ribbon to make an area where we can stick papers, etc without having to pin them. I also wanted to add a little bot of color with the fabric.

The finished product! I also had to test it out and see if it really was magnetic. My Cricut machine came with a magnetic sheet that I had never used so I cut out some letters to make our name and cover them with some scrapbook paper. Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out and the kids love checking to see if there are new messages up on the chalkboard!:-)