Our Hallway Is Done & It’s Magnetic!

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Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been working on a hallway makeover and after having everywhere plastered and about 30 hours of cleaning and painting it’s done!

When we first moved in it looked like this…

After a quick coat of white paint not long after moving in it turned into this…

… and now (drumroll please) it’s transformed into this!

We’re so pleased with how it turned out – no more Artex, no more yellow and chipped paint and no more peeling wallpaper!

Inevitably it’s taken a lot of work to get to this point. We completely stripped, sanded and repainted the front door and frame, we removed the laminate floor and sanded the original floorboards, we stripped, sanded and painted our skirting, we spent over 250 hours restoring our staircase.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been taking the last few steps to get our hallway done and had the hallway replastered, painted everywhere and spent a bit too much time playing with our amazing new magnetic wall.

Yep, you heard right – a magnetic wall!

Even though I took part in an event a while ago where I had a chance to try it out, I have to admit that I was sceptical about how well it would work in real life. Well, it turns out I shouldn’t have worried – it really does work!

All of our pictures and even the coat hooks aren’t screwed to the wall – they’re all just attached with magnets!

The magnetic wall is amazing and the possibilities are endless. It gives you so much flexibility to change things around without leaving hundreds of holes in the wall. No more need to plan out a gallery wall before you attach it – just ‘stick’ your art to the wall and move it around until you are happy. It’s just so easy.

We used magnetic sheets which come with a sticky back and all you have to do is cut them to the size you want (which is really easy with just some scissors) and then stick them to whatever you want to attach to the wall. We used these magnets which were kindly provided by First4Magnets. They were the strongest sheet magnets we could find and worked perfectly on our new wall.

If you use strong magnets, you can even stick attach fairly heavy items to the wall (the Rooms Made For You website recommends not going over 5kg).

Both the magnetic plaster and the normal plaster have roughly the same drying time (magnetic plaster is applied slightly thicker, so will take a tiny bit longer to dry) so we had to wait a few days before we could get our paintbrushes out.

Although our house isn’t huge, we do have a fairly large hallway and high ceilings which meant that the size of the area we had to paint really added up – especially considering that the whole room had to be painted 4 times!

Yep, you heard right – 4 times. Because the walls are newly plastered they soak up any moisture almost immediately which means that you have to prime them before painting.

It’s important to do the necessary prep work when painting new plaster and you can read our full guide on how to paint new plaster walls here.

1. Prime the walls (we use watered-down white emulsion)
2. Prime the walls again
3. Paint the walls with white emulsion
4. Paint the finishing colour coat
5. Apply a second coat of the finishing paint

I know it sounds like a lot (and it is) but you really don’t want to waste your expensive paint because you can’t apply it properly and the first 3 steps ensure that you have a good base to work from.

We don’t really have a dedicated place to hang coats and jackets, which is fine when it’s just the two of us, but as soon as we have anyone visiting there always seems to be a pile of coats covering every surface.

We don’t really want a coat stand in the hallway (I think they always look messy and end up full of clutter), so figured that we’d really try to make the most of our new magnetic plaster wall and have coat hooks that we can attach to the wall as and when we need them.

Now when we have guests visiting we can attach as many hooks as we need and hide them again when everyone has gone. Because it’s so flexible, we can attach hooks at different heights so that visiting children can have their own lower hooks, too.

I should point out that you need really strong magnets for the coat hooks and that hanging anything heavy on them doesn’t work overly well – we do love to test things to their limit and it was worth a try!

I love that we can easily change our pictures in the hallway around and that we can easily leave notes and reminders on our wall that we’ll (hopefully) see before leaving the house.

I would love to have magnetic walls everywhere, but the magnetic plaster is expensive so, in reality, it’s only something you would use for select areas. Having said that we’ll definitely be using it again and are already thinking of having a magnetic wall in our new kitchen.

I guess that you can tell we’re really happy with our new hallway and in particular the magnetic wall.

It’s great to have no more Artex and the magnetic wall works much better than we’d ever expected. As great as it is, we should probably start to get back to working on projects we’d actually planned on doing this year – but hey, sticking to projects we actually planned to do this year would be boring!

Have you ever heard of magnetic plaster? Would or have you used it in your home? What do you think of our colour choice? Where would you have magnetic plaster walls in your home?

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