want to try it: magnetic primer
Maybe it has to do with getting older, but these days, September is at once a funeral of the summer and a nostalgic time in which back-to-school has morphed into back-to-work. That crisp autumn air always stokes a fire in me to go on an office supply binge at The Container Store for a home office I don’t currently have. But the dream office I have in my head? That one is impeccably appointed. On the improvements front, I’ve been considering road testing some magnetic primer to create a multi-purpose backsplash of sorts. A few coats of this Rust-Oleum Latex Primer, $22.67/can at Home Depot should do the trick, but I’m seeing a lot of mixed reviews. The Youngsters over at Young House Love found moderate success with it in their quest to find a new place to hang their wallflowers and offer a helpful how-to on the subject. Has anyone else successfully used a specialty primer (magnetic, whiteboard, chalkboard) in an office? – Sarah C.
I created a magnetic chalkboard wall in my last house, the texture is rougher than you’d expect, making the chalk lines a wee bit bumpy, but it was still great. Only rare earth magnets worked on my wall though..others just weren’t strong enough to hold anything but tracing paper.
When I redid my kitchen, I painted the doors in magnetic and chalkboard paint. I love it but just a warning: you will need many, many coats to get any magnets to work on this. I did at least four coats before I got tired of painting.
We did this in our playroom so we could play with magnetic letters. Lissette S is right — you will need TONS of coats of the magnetic paint. I did three or four coats, and it’s not very strongly magnetic. We can only use those flat vinyl magnets where the whole back is magnetic (like magnetic business cards or fridge poetry). Anything where there is a decoration glued to a small magnet doesn’t work. And the magnets are not strong enough to hold up papers or anything — it has to be flat, lightweight magnet applied directly to the wall with nothing in between or no dice.
Also, we painted over the magnetic paint to match the wall, and have found that magnets that don’t get moved around a lot tend to pull up a little speck of wall paint and expose the magnetic primer when you finally do move them. This may be due to the humidity levels or the surface we painted on or some other mysterious factor, but I thought it was worth pointing out all the same.
It happened that this magnetic-paint wall works for our playroom purposes, but I would not mess with this stuff again. It’s too much trouble for sub-par results.
Seriously, don’t bother. I used SEVEN coats of it on my son’s play kitchen, thinking it would be awesome to have magnets on the fridge. Nothing! Magnetic poetry would sort-of stick before I got the top coat on, but once the paint was on top, even that failed.
I’m still bitter about it, to tell you the truth.
Once I got the rare earth magnets the primer (two coats) worked a treat.
I painted a contrasting shade from the surrounding wall so that the different texture looked more deliberate, but the whole thing has been so full of layers of tear sheets in the years since I did it that I actually haven’t seen the wall in some time.
As mentioned on Facebook, I did my entry hallway with this and it’s pretty much a fail. The store only had BLACK primer so it took two coats of my bright pink paint to effectively cover that and then the magnetic effect was just about lost. Very very small magnets that are JUST magnets (like Daffodil says) would stick, but that’s about it. I originally did it so I could “pin” things to the wall right by the front door – tickets for upcoming concerts, photos that I don’t want to commit to a frame, summer festival calendars, papers I need to remember to take to work with me in the morning… No dice. Over the past two years, the magnetism has even somehow worn off. A magnet that had been in place for a long long time got bumped, fell down and now won’t stick to the wall at all. It has gone back to living on the fridge. Best part? The pink paint where that magnet was fell off with the magnet, leaving a black patch that I now get to touch up.
LOL at these responses. And to let you all know, Sara’s play kitchen is the one that we featured here awhile back: http://www.shelterrific.com/2010/05/26/play-kitchen-makeover-from-janky-to-swanky/
When I was young, my mother purchased this paint so I could have magnetic poetry in my room. It was a complete and utter failure, but we did discover that we could make our own games for the car pretty successfully. We printed our own photographs onto magnet paper in the ink jet printer and made a two-sided chess/checkers board for the car. It was a blast! Functional for the many ways we dreamed it could be used? Nope. A blast for entertaining children in the back seat? Absolutely! I recommend it, but only if you are prepared to work within its unfortunate parameters…
As for whiteboard primer, I’d skip it all together. A sheet of the same material used for shower walls is cheap and saves the headache and works great as a giant whiteboard.
it’s too true about the weak magnetic force; i have a 2′x2′ mag-primed section in my study, and i use the little super-magnet cubes to hold up posters.