I've posted this before, but here's ours. The mail slots and frame were built from scrap lumber from the garage, the marker holder is fluted case molding, the cork is leftover tiles from our floor, the white board calendars are from Target, and the magnetic chalkboard is painted onto the wall.

This forum moves really fast, so I'm giving your thread a bump. You may want to try searching under the term "message center." There's been a bunch of those in the past.

Here's one.
anyone have a kitchen message center?

I don't have a picture for you, but we have put ours on a big barn door that divides the kitchen from the family room. We painted the door with magnetic primer, and finished with black chalk-board paint. Now I have a 7'x6' (42 sq ft!) surface to hang the kids' pictures, notes, to-do lists, etc. We haven't used any chalk on it yet, but I'm glad to have this space (esp. since we "lost" the fridge as a magnetic surface when we went stainless).

The thing about magnetic primer is that it's expensive and tedious to paint with, and you need a super strong magnet to work on it. There are others who've hung a sheet of steel on their wall to use as a magnetic surface.

I really like that, laxsupermom!

Has anyone seen a message centre using an iPad as the calendar? How cool would that be??

I'm actually putting our "message" area in our family room, so I wanted something that looked slightly "artsy". I'm doing magnetic boards with a fabric covering. I found these on etsy. You can either buy them premade with the fabrics shown or buy the boards and cover them yourself. I'm covering the boards with my own fabric.

Here is a link that might be useful: Stick to It

What a great idea to add fabric over a sheet of metal! I am going to do some serious fabric shopping thanks to you :) I was thinking of the blackboard paint over the sheetmetal but was worried about chalk all over the place and keeping it neat looking with 2 boys. If I have little clasps of some sort put in the niche, I can take the board out and swap fabric as the mood hits. Maybe even change it seasonally (though I am horrible about putting any holiday stuff up other than Xmas). I would not even bother to sew and just tuck the fabric behind the sheet and use velcro or even duct tape, lol
I am thinking once things get fixed up and pretty, I will be more bonded with this house and do more for it. It is in a sorry state so far.... The kids are old enough not to worry as much about them destroying nice things, so maybe the timing is right!

A few creative ideas...
~boxerpups

I love all those ideas! I'm still tweaking what we have. I'm not using these calendars effectively right now but I think it will just take practice. It's still all so new to me. We will doing more work on our house, including adding built-in desks in our school/office space. I will have white boards for each child since we homeschool, as well as cork boards for each child in his/her own desk space. For the family calendar, we will most likely end up using iCal on the family iMac, but I still like this idea. I have the current month and the subsequent 2 months, plus a weekly to-do board. These all have magnets on the back. The current one and the weekly one go on the shelf; the other two are below the shelf on metal strips attached to the wall. The silver board is actually magnetic and push pin. The metal outer layer has pin-sized holes all over it, and underneath is a material that accepts pins. I love it. I purchased all these from storables.com.

I love all these ideas, I wish we had the wall space. One of our counters is always filled with papers.

I TRY to keep it organized, but it's still usually a mess. :(

Here is mine. Its just chalkboard paint, which I masked off. The blue box under it holds papers and has a phone charger in it. I kind of wished I had painted a magnetic primer first though because then I could have also used it as a bulletin board.
{{!gwi}}

i want to make a framed magnetic boad that could also be chalked ...is there a good kind of magnetic primer that works better than others? and then i can put the chalk paint on top?

We had a big wall behind our kitchen table where we hung the simplest possible (read: cheapest) large chalkboard we could think of (other than just painting the wall with chalkboard paint, but the wall is textured and we wanted a smooth surface). We bought a large sheet of masonite and painted it with chalkboard paint and bolted it to the wall.

The chalkboard is useful for our running grocery and Costco lists, and as a place for working out algebra problems, among many other things.

We also needed to cover an electrical panel (we decided not to move it outdoors in order to save some $$). We needed to be able to uncover the panel easily so we cut out a piece of the masonite to fit around the panel and then hung a bulletin board to float over the panel. I originally planned to make a more attractive bulletin board but we had this one and it's working and so it's stayed.

This isn't the best picture but you get the idea:

This is mostly for the grands to play with:

you all inspired me...and then i went and bought one! here's what i bought:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/55976652/very-large-magnetic-chalkboard-great-for

and it's going on the wall between the fridge and the basement door:

No picture but I bought an extra cabinet door (Cherry Shaker style w/ solid wood panel) and routed grooves in the back of the panel to 1/8" of the front, and glued 3/8" steel rods into the grooves, Grooves are 3" apart.

I had to get fairly large magnets to work thru the 1/8" layer of wood. Looks and works great. There is no reason this could not be done on a functioning cabinet door, or on all your cabinet doors.
The magnets are 1" dia X 1" long Neodyium magnets, glued into a block of cherry wood and felt over the magnet. That's overkill! one magnet will hold a pretty thick magazine. or calender. Probably could get by with magnets half that size. Most regular refrigerator magnets will not work thru 1/8" of wood.