For Christmas Ryan and I made Norah some super easy alphabet magnets. It was simple, I found a font I liked and using Microsoft Word put 2 of every number and letter in a document. Then I printed it all onto different coloured card stock that I had lying around. Next I picked up some self adhesive laminating paper at Walmart. It was about $15 total and you take the card stock letters/numbers and place them evenly between 2 sheets of the laminate paper and apply pressure. Then you carefully cut out all of the letters/numbers leaving a lot of room so the laminate paper can adhere to itself. Next we added magnets to the back which you can buy just about anywhere! The whole thing cost about $20 and took a couple of hours while we watched TV. We LOVE the result.
The ultimate plan was to put them on the fridge for Norah to play with when she was a little older. However, we sold the house and the fridge at the new house is stainless steel.... Which equates to messy fingerprints all over it no matter what you do... Ok if you don't want to hear my rant please skip forward to the next paragraph... I always said I didn't want stainless steel appliances because the fingerprint issue drives me crazy... but when you buy a house that has ALL stainless steel appliances you think well maybe I'm just being anal... NOPE. I HATE the stainless steel. If I wipe it down it looks worse than before!! The water marks and the finger prints and the dirt... ohhhhh it drives me crazy!! My mom even got a special cleaner for us and it helps a bit but it honestly still looks like smudgy poop (yes I used the word poop... I'm tired.. haahaa).
OK back on track here... our stainless steel fridge is not magnetic.... BOOO (I can't even hide the smudgy fingerprints behind pictures...). So this meant I would have to get a magnetic board for Norah. After creating her play zone in the living room I figured it would be a GREAT place for a board. Not wanting a chalkboard or an ugly big black square in the living room I did some research into options. I had previously seen Rustoleums Magnetic Paint at Home Depot and did some research to find that it works pretty well AND you can paint the wall colour back over it and it will still work.
I picked up a can for around $25 (I don't remember exactly how much it was). It only takes half an hour to dry between coats so I managed to paint 4 coats while Norah napped one afternoon. And this is what we had
I used painters tape to tape off the square, however in the future if I do this again I won't do that because it left a small ridge at the edge. Not a big deal since our walls have a bumpy finish to them so you can't see the ridge. Now I had a big black rectangle starring at me every time I was in the living room!!
Well I quickly remedied this, two coats of living room paint later I had this! Now I know I need to do a third coat of paint, you can still see the edges if you look closely but I haven't had time. Not bad though!!
As far as magnetic 'stick' goes it isn't bad. The can of paint says to do 3 thin coats for best results. I had read online doing a few more is good. So I went with 4 thin coats. It holds the magnetic letters no problem and even holds some heavier fridge magnets we have. It isn't SUPER magnetic so anything heavy it won't hold but for this purpose it is GREAT!!!
I still have a tonne of this paint left too so I have an idea for the kitchen and the basement at some point.
