Can You Use Masonry Paint on a Wooden Shed?

Masonry paint can add a lot of protection, it is usually waterproof but still breathable. It also commonly includes a fungicide to prevent fungal growth. These are all really good reasons why you might want to use masonry paint on a wooden shed, but will this work?

Yes, you can use masonry paint on a wooden shed. Masonry paint works well on wood as can be shown by my testing. It will also help to prolong the life of the wood it is painted on.

So what makes me so confident to say all this above, well the simple answer is I have done a lot of testing with masonry paint on wood.

Masonry paint actually works really well on wood and provides a lot of protection, I have actually painted by fence using Sandtex Smooth Masonry Paint.

Painting My Fence With Masonry Paint

To really test whether you can use masonry paint on fences I decided to paint my own fence. I was building a new fence in my backyard and wanted the interior colour to be quite bright. I couldn’t find a shade I liked in traditional fencing paint but already had the perfect colour in SandTex mid stone masonry paint. So I decided to use just that.

So here it is, the brand new fence, expertly constructed by yours truly, just waiting for a fresh coat of paint. This fence is made from green treated feather board and as you can see has a few different shades in there due to that treatment so it needed a good coat of paint.

The masonry paint went onto the fence really easily. As a bit of a litmus test, the other side of the fence was painted using fencing paint. While the masonry paint did not apply as quickly as the fence paint due to it being thicker it did cover a lot better.

In the end, I only needed one coat of masonry paint on the inside whereas on the outside I ended up needing three coats of the fence paint!

The finished fence, I think it looks great. I really like this colour of masonry paint. It still keeps the wood looking quite natural while adding a lot of uniformity.

6 Month Fence Update!

For those of you keeping track, it’s now been six months since the fence was painted with masonry paint (give or take a few weeks). So it’s time to check back in with an update and let you all know how the paint is getting on, I know you can’t wait!

As you can see the fence still looks just as good as the day it was painted. So that’s the summer over with, now time for the real test, a Northern English winter. Check back next year for another instalment in this thrilling saga!

So while I don’t have any photos of a shed to show you we can see that masonry paint works very well on a fence.

Fencing timber and the timber used to make a shed are very similar, in fact, they are often the same wood. So we can easily deduce that if the masonry paint is working really well on this fence it will also work really well on a shed.

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Still Not Convinced

Still not sure if you should be using masonry paint on your shed? Well luckily for you I have done even more testing, hoping to show you just how well masonry paint works on wood.

Testing Masonry Paint on Wood

So below are all of the different squares of paints I will be testing. We will test each paint, both with a primed piece of wood, and an unprimed piece to see how much of a difference priming the wood first makes.

I applied two coats of paint to each sample, so the primed pieces ended up with three coats (1 coat of primer and two of the paint of choice).

So the wood samples have been sat outside now, fully exposed to the elements, for around six months. I think it’s time to take a look at them all and give you guys an update.

So here are all the samples, looking pretty good. But let’s have a closer look at them all one by one as there are a few interesting things going on.Pine

The pine has held up really well so far and there is no visible difference between the primed and unprimed pine.

So far so good, it looks like masonry paint will protect pine that is left outside.

MDF

Again, very much like before. The MDF has held up brilliantly, both the primed and un-primed still looking as good as new.

Plywood

Another one that is holding up perfectly and with no difference that I can see between the two samples.Fencing Timber

Masonry Paint on Fencing Timber 6 months later

Like all of the other woods so far the masonry paint has done a great job of protecting this fencing timber.

Chipboard

Now we finally have something to talk about. The chipboard has swelled quite a bit and gone lumpy. This obviously means water has been getting in somewhere.

You can also clearly see that the primed one has fared a lot better so far. So just adding that extra layer of paint has helped to seal it. Although it has still gone a little lump, but nowhere near as bad as the sample without primer.

If you want to see the full experiment including more tests then you can find it here.

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