Magnetic organizing for the boys

I haven't been posting much for the past few weeks; while I've been busy doing stuff around the house, it seems that it's a bit of this and a little bit of that, and I'm not actually finishing any projects.

One thing that I've been working on is organizing the boys' rooms. In particular, they have a lot of papers that they want or need to save, that currently land in messy piles on their desks. Last weekend the Easter Bunny delivered some adorable wooden pirate magnets and clothespins for Cal

and some space-themed ones for Matthew.

I had a pint of magnetic primer that I picked up at Christmas time hanging around in the basement so I cracked it open and slapped some up on the back of Cal's door. I figured that using the back of the door has two advantages: it's basically wasted space in the room, and I won't have to see the clutter when I walk by in the hallway.

The magnetic primer is very dark. It's also very heavy - the little pint can weighs about a gazillion pounds and when the guy in the paint store handed it to me I almost dropped it on my toes as I wasn't prepared for the weight. It makes sense seeing how it's full of iron particles, but that thought hadn't crossed my mind when I was grabbing the can. 

I didn't tape the edges when I was painting since I plan to repaint the door white, and I figured that the edges would feather in better and be less obvious if I didn't use tape. I put up five coats of the primer so that the magnets would stick well. The side of the can says that you should do three coats and then  cover with two coats of latex, but I have my doubts that two coats of white will be sufficient. I hedged my bets by applying five coats of primer, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the magnets will still work once I have the painting all done.

When Matthew saw Cal's door all primed, he decided that he liked the blackboard-like look of the paint, so I taped off the area on the back of his door that I wanted to fill in and used the old anti-bleeding trick of putting a coat of the base colour around the edges of the tape to seal it up well.

Four coats later, and the door is finished.

 

It provides a lot of hanging space for papers and Blue Jay Schedule magnets. Am I ever happy that I won't have to stare at that on my fridge for the whole summer like I've had to every baseball season for the past decade! 

I still need to pick up some magnets to glue to the back of the clothespins so that they can be used to hang papers. And I noticed when I was painting that poor Matthew had no doorknob on his door. I guess I must have forgotten to put it back on after I finished painting his room last year! That'll be task #1 on my list this weekend.