change is good: Bulletin Board Makeover

I'm excited to be participating in my first bloggie party! :)

A while back, I found this U-G-L-Y bulletin board/clock for at Home Goods. Don't you just love Home Goods?

Can you believe that the original price for this was $39.99??? Who would pay that much? Apparently no one, since they had about a dozen of these with different cities. They were all on clearance for $10, but for some reason this one was only $5! Maybe its because the clock was broken...

Anyway, I had been looking for something to fill two purposes:
1) a place to put notes to my husband - with the hope that he wouldn't forget things like his phone, lap top, baby, etc. (Just kidding about the baby part.)
and
2) to hide the phone jack in our kitchen. We don't have a land line and the jack is bright white plastic on a red wall. Very noticable. (I meant to take a picture of this, but I forgot. And now our battery is dead in the camera and I want to get this post done.)

This bulletin board, with a little bit of jazzing up, would fit the bill.

My original plan was to remove the clock and paint that area with chalkboard paint. But I couldn't figure out how to fill the hole where the clock parts were.
While I was trying to figure that out, I went ahead and painted the hideous gray trim black.

Wanting to get this project done and off of my kitchen table, I scrapped the chalkboard idea and went another direction. I used scrapbook paper and some fun corkboard letters and made this, with our last name on it:


Here is a picture of it hanging above our coffee cart, where my husband will see it every morning while he's making his coffee.

I added thumb tacks and a note that says, "don't forget your phone!" So far, it has worked. :)