Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Do home projects that your husband did count as crafty?

Well, I'm posting about this bike rack anyway, because it was my idea and it came out so well!

We recently spent too much money rebuilding our garage.  Our garage was in such bad shape that the assessor for our home value when we bought our house didn't even count it as any value at all. He joked he should take something off since we'd have to tear it down.

For more than 10 years, Mr. Wonderful crippled that garage along to act as a storage place for a great number of things. But it was disgusting - dark, leaky, rotten wood, full of black widow spiders kind of bad. And Mr. Wonderful has never had even a workbench to call his own around here. Our house is pretty small for a family of four and without a garage there just wasn't anyplace to put hobby stuff for him besides nooks and crannies in the basement and the leaky, rotting, falling down garage. Poor man.

Now we have a shiny rebuilt garage with electricity, lighting, and even drywall!  Not only that, but our contractor "finished" a part of the walk-in crawl space with a nice concrete pad for just another grand (notice how it's always multiples of $1000 for any change order?)  I call it our "sub-tic" because not only is our house small, it doesn't even have an attic for storage of things like Christmas decorations or camping equipment.  We'll have to keep the storage locker at least for now, but this does open up a lot of possibilities.

What do we not have? Money to outfit this shiny garage with.  But one of the main space-sucking things we need to store in there are bicycles.  When it's nice, the bikes in use at any given time get locked up in the backyard with this  - a brilliant little latching post made out of plumbing parts (Mr. Wonderful is just so clever).



Okay remember at the beginning when I said the bike rack was my idea?  No, it was not my idea - I found it on the internet of course!  At instructables.com to be precise...

I went in search of space-saving bike storage  on the world wide web, and came across this:

Nifty huh? Couple of 2 x 4s, a bunch of long wood screws, and a bunch of big hooks.  That's it (except for the work of putting it together which I gather was relatively simple in the world of home improvement projects).

The hooks are cleverly staggered
I think this baby holds 6 bikes in all.
 

Just a view from the door.  Basically what you see is what you get - there isn't a vast space over to the right or anything.  There will be a workbench or two though, and this bike solution rocks the space utilization!

1 comment:

  1. mmm! The garage redo looks fabulous & Mr. Wonderful did his usual fine work with the bike rack.

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