climbs

OK. Jonathan, here when he was 13, does not really risk his life climbing on rocks. But sometimes you can cut the picture in a very impressive manner. Still, Jonathan and me climb quite a lot. Mainly bouldering indoor. And when you are serious, you have to practice. So we needed to have a wall.

Our first plan was to build a small climbing wall in Jonathan’s room. Luckily, this plan was vetoed by my wife with the message “you will destroy our house!!!”.

So we compromised on the garage. Just that the garage had a very old asbestos roofing. Not a very healthy place to practise. So we decided to invest and renew the roof. Good luck with that… No one wants to deal with such a small project - only a few square meters of asbestos, and, in general, tiny roof.

So we decided that Jonathan and me will do the work. We will gain by that a huge amount of money that would, otherwise, be paid to a contractor. And we will get part of that fortune to build our dream wall.

This was our garage back then, covered with climbing plant. This was in the end of the winter, with the traditional snowman residues in the middle of the grass.

After some reading about the danger in dealing with asbestos, I got for us some protection from Amazon. And then we started, first by removing the climbing plants:

As you can see, regarding the protection no compromises were made.

We got rid of the old roof (tiles and the asbestos plates).

And as this garage is about 80 years old, we got also new beams for the new roof. Originally I was very worried about the work with the beams. This sounded to me like something only professional builders do. And I am a very modest do-it-yourself guy. So the pictures below shows how simple it actually is.

And I am lucky that Jonathan took care of my head so it will not be totally bruised by bumping again and again to the very same beam.

And in general these were amazingly beautiful days - we enjoyed every moment of the work.

And then we placed the new roof.

Now we had to start working on the wall. But we had a plan. Seriously. Following our adventures with the 3D Printer we built, Jonathan is a master in SketchUp. And together with me (the once-upon-a-time-mechanical-engineer), he came with a very nice plan:

From the other side you can see the construction that holds the plates.

And just that you understand the sizes:

The beams construction plan is very useful as even before we started the roof tearing down project, we could already order the exact beams we needed.

Now we started working on the wall. Big fun.

And in the middle of the work, in one weekend we managed to solve a big problem: climbing holds cost a fortune.

The guys from our real climbing wall (Klimzaal Blok) suggested that we check with Axis Round Edges. I looked at the price list, very concerned, and then called Frank Bogerman. Frank was very welcoming and suggested we come on a Saturday. So we travelled to Roterdam.

When we arrived, we found out that Frank has already prepared around 10 boxes of holds that were production-left-overs, and holds from demonstrations. Frank said something like “for people who build private walls in their garage we keep these holds and give them in a special price”. And the price was per Kg.

Hmm… while Jonathan was selecting the holds from the different boxes, I went to weigh some of them. Then I thought, “cool!”.

From a plan of buying maybe 50 holds, we ended up with much more than 200 holds. And not small holds. Bolts were given together with the holds (again priced by weight). And two boxes of screws for free (!?!), and a bag of sand for free. And plenty of tips regarding how to do things.

We are really thankful to Axis Round Edges.

Now we were extra motivated to continue building.

Because we had a very accurate plan, we could cut the beams to measure and just place them in their designated locations as if they were Lego bricks.

First climbing on holds (we used these holds as handles for these heavy plywood plates).

We would not leave the wall without painting it:

Exactly as planned:

Now we can climb :-)

The only thing left to do is to get proper matrasses. We first got four cheap matrasses but with those we could not really take risks on the wall. We started asking around and got an old double matrass, and then we got rid of an old sofa which was really nice as it contained a lot of hard foam. And we got also an old wall to wall carpet.

Now we had to cover it with the green (as in the plan) PVC cover, so it is nice and shiny. But first we have to plan and then to fight with the heavy PVC cover:

And after some fighting we got an impression of how it is going to look like.

Now we had to place some light beams on the cover so it is connected nicely to the floor. Like that:

And that’s it. We are done building. Really. Well, just a small plan for a volume on the blue wall (it turns out that a straight wall is not as interesting as we expected), and maybe a small extended wall on the left, but - really - nothing big :-)