IKEA Magnetic Board Hack: Command Center

Before moving to this house we moved basically every year. This meant that every year we did a major purge and organization on our stuff. I love that we haven't moved in three years, BUT I'm getting a major itch to go through our stuff and get rid of what we don't use and organize the rest. One spot that was in desperate need of order was the fridge.

We liked the idea of not having anything on the fridge so I picked up these magnetic boards from Ikea. They are pretty inexpensive but kinda blah to look at.

To beef them up a bit and have them look slightly nicer, we built a frame that would hold them both to create a command center.

This is a really simple and basic frame to build. We measured and cut 1x2 to fit around the boards and used L brackets to connect everything together.

1. Glue each joint, clamp and let dry
2. Attach L bracket on either side of the joint to secure it. Let the L-bracket hang over the edge so it can be attached to the pre-drilled holes in the magnetic board (this requires a bit of measuring to find the right placement)
3. Stain the visible sides of the frame
4. Attach the L-bracket using small machine screws and a nut.

We used the L-brackets in all four corners of the magnetic boards so we used a total of eight on this project and another four for the elephant art (from Friday) frame that you can see stained in the background of the next pic.

I used small headed screws to hang the board on the bare wall in the kitchen. The small heads on the screws allowed me to still use the holes in the boards intended for hanging (which were considerably smaller due to connecting to the L-brackets).

The boards with the frame fits perfectly on our empty wall in the kitchen. It's a perfect spot and size to hang up important reminders, pics and of course Will's artwork! The boards are also uber magnetic... there isn't any sliding of magnets on these things... more like prying of magnets off. Also, there are at least three warnings to not write on the boards but I tried some whiteboard marker and it came right off so I'm not sure what the deal is with that.

And now our fridge is looking a lot less cluttered however now without the distraction of all the stuff on it, you can see how dirty it is and the gap around it and the cabinets is much more noticeable so we'll have to work on that.

Linking To: Hi Sugar Plum, The Great Indoors, House of Hepworths, My Repurposed Life, Our Delightful Home, Five Days Five Ways, Serenity Now, Lovely Etc., The Rooster and the Hen, Six Sisters Stuff, Tatertots and Jello, Wayward Girls Crafts, Twigg Studio, Serendipity and Spice, Ask Anna, Home Stories A to Z, Uncommon Designs, House wives of Riverton, Crafty Texas Girls, Southern Institute, Watch out Martha!, http://www.myrepurposedlife.com http://www.lizmarieblog.com/ http://missmustardseed.com/