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Home Wall - Worth it? Doable?

Roberts Kalnins · · Maryland · Joined Jul 2019 · Points: 5

I think it's very doable and worth it. My housemates and I built an 8x10 freestanding wall in our garage earlier this year for about $400. Holds from Metolius (the starter pack is good), Teknik, Atomik, So iLL, and Escape (mystery boxes provide good variety) cost another $400-500.

The wall has made training really convenient and it's been getting a lot of use so far.

We mounted 3/4" plywood on a frame built from 2x6s and everything feels really solid on big moves in any direction.

Lincoln S · · Goleta · Joined Jan 2019 · Points: 287

if you have like 3 or 4 friends, build a home wall, it's sick. total cost was about $1200, so between me and my 3 friends, $300 each. that's less than I'd have spent on a gym membership during the time we've had the home wall and the gym has been closed. shell out for good holds, you want to WANT to climb on it, not feel like you HAVE to climb on it. Kilter holds are sick but they aren't cheap, and IMO worth every penny.

caesar.salad · · earth · Joined Dec 2012 · Points: 75

I've got a moonboard and a 50 degree 9'w x 11'h spray wall with kicker. plus a campus board, rings, squat rack, bar and hangboard. love it, no regrets. i spend time in the gym even when im not working out. i just like hanging in there. you can do the same with your kid. 

if you arent experienced with building... as a contractor i met once said, "if you dont know how to build, build a lot". more screws more wood. itll be safe... probably. holds will be your biggest expense. if you have the space and climb hard enough, a moonboard is pretty cost effective.

mbb · · Unknown Hometown · Joined Dec 2010 · Points: 0

Worth it and totally doable.  I built mine after kid #3 arrived and we finally bought a house with a spare room.  I had basically no woodworking experience and because I am a cheap bastard I used a $20 hand saw to make all the cuts.  Only took a few days to build.  I use the wall all the time. With kids, it is so much more time efficient than going to the gym.  If you like to train and don't mind doing it alone, a home wall is amazing to have once you have kids.

I did a bunch of research and have no regrets with my design.   My background, I was a pretty solid mid 5.13 climber before kids and did some route setting too.  For what it's worth, here is my advice...

Make the wall as high and as wide as you can. 

Don't listen to the common advice to only use full sheets of plywood.  If you can squeeze in an extra foot of height or width, buy an extra sheet and cut it.  

Make the wall all the same angle

Frame with 2x6s.

Put in a ton of holes.  I used an offset grid pattern with 132 holes per sheet.

Don't paint the plywood.  A light sanding maybe, but that's it.

A kicker is important.

As you can see with my wall, I left space to the right of the wall for access to the area behind the wall.  This is a great storage area and the kids build forts back there.

Have fun!

Phil Sakievich · · Unknown Hometown · Joined Aug 2014 · Points: 131

I built an outdoor moonboard due to a new kid coming along. Having it during covid has also been a life saver tbh. This is my second big wall and to me it is way better than the last one which was a spray wall. Mainly because I don’t have time to set interesting routes and find it hard to get others interested in doing it with me. With my first wall it often came down to spend a day setting or climbing. I usually just went with repeating the same problems over and over again. Since I’m not really much of a setter I found I wasn’t really challenging myself and mastered problems I thought would be hard in a couple of weeks. The “boards” are nice in this regard because you have near infinite problems, a community to benchmark your progress and never have to reset. There are drawbacks to this approach too, but for me it has been worth the compromise. The moonboard is a ton of fun and I’ve gotten way stronger. Maybe not a sloper master but I can live with that. Also all the major board companies have smaller home boards now that could probably be made to fit in your indoor space.

The design/build process is a major time sink. Prepare yourself for this but it is worth it. 

John Byrnes · · Fort Collins, CO · Joined Dec 2007 · Points: 392
Capt. Impatient wrote: Climate control, Climate control, Climate control, worse thing about my wall in my garage. In the summer, in the Midwest, hot and hella humid. In the winter, It took the propane heater 30 minutes to get it to an ok tempture. 

THIS ^^^^  is really important.  Mine's in the basement where it stays at a good temp all year round.    The garage will suck unless it's insulated, heated and cooled (been there, done that).   I use mine a lot, i.e. Worth it.

csproul · · Pittsboro...sort of, NC · Joined Dec 2009 · Points: 330
John Byrnes wrote:

THIS ^^^^  is really important.  Mine's in the basement where it stays at a good temp all year round.    The garage will suck unless it's insulated, heated and cooled (been there, done that).   I use mine a lot, i.e. Worth it.

Sometime you dont have the option of climate control. I have mine in a garage in North Carolina...i.e. summer sucks. But I bought an industrial sized fan from Harbor Freight and a screen/bug net that goes on the garage door, and this has made a world of difference and made it tolerable even in the worst of the summer.

Lincoln S · · Goleta · Joined Jan 2019 · Points: 287

Hard agree that a kicker is necessary. It makes for a surprising amount of extra usable room on the board

Lyle Murphy · · Unknown Hometown · Joined Sep 2017 · Points: 5

Just do

pat a · · ann arbor, mi · Joined Oct 2015 · Points: 0
csproul wrote:

Sometime you dont have the option of climate control. I have mine in a garage in North Carolina...i.e. summer sucks. But I bought an industrial sized fan from Harbor Freight and a screen/bug net that goes on the garage door, and this has made a world of difference and made it tolerable even in the worst of the summer.

Mine lives in the back yard here in Michigan.  It's not *awful*, but you have to pick and choose when you climb.  Mid-day in the summer during quarantine was a no-go, but it was fine once the sun went down.  

I haven't used it that much over the winter, but have been pleasantly surprised on the few days I've used it below  freezing.  The plastic and wood holds don't suck nearly as much heat out of your hands as rock does.   With a fire pit and whiskey to warm up between burns it's livable for lower intensity climbing.  

Biggest downside to having it outside is the humidity/temperature swings causing holds to loosen up all the damn time....

Agree about the kicker for the base.  I didn't add one and really wish I had.

Princess Puppy Lovr · · Rent-n, WA · Joined Jun 2018 · Points: 1,756
pat a wrote:

Biggest downside to having it outside is the humidity/temperature swings causing holds to loosen up all the damn time....

One reason why I just put a screw in almost every hold. The hold you fliped is actually usable upside down. 

John Byrnes · · Fort Collins, CO · Joined Dec 2007 · Points: 392
csproul wrote:

Sometime you dont have the option of climate control. I have mine in a garage in North Carolina...i.e. summer sucks. But I bought an industrial sized fan from Harbor Freight and a screen/bug net that goes on the garage door, and this has made a world of difference and made it tolerable even in the worst of the summer.

It's not just the summer.  The OP is just down the road from me, and I know for a fact that winter can be worse.    I was in a co-op that purpose-built a shed (16x16) to put a climbing wall in.  Poured concrete, framed it, put on the roof, full insulation, skylight, electrical (lights, heat, music), etc.  

We had a fan for summer but going in there in the Winter, after the heat had been off for days, your hands would go numb just waiting for the heaters to make a difference.   The air would get warm rather quickly but the HOLDS were sometimes single digits cold and due to their mass, it takes quite a while for them to warm up!!

TBlom · · Unknown Hometown · Joined Jun 2004 · Points: 360

Definitely worth it.  Living in Southeast North Carolina, it is about all the climbing I get to do.  Add in Covid and an 18 month old, and I'm pretty glad to have it.

Build it fairly steep to keep it fun, Vertical walls get boring.  You can make your own holds out of wood with a minimal set of tools.

You can add bolts and quickdraws if you want to practice clipping or simply get more pumped.

I went with a 8'x8' 45 degree wall, 2x6 @16" OC, 3/4" sanded ply.  Kicker is about 30" tall and 2x4 @ 16" OC.  Some folks like building only out of 2x4 at 24" OC, which is fine, but I prefer a less bouncy structure (If you weigh 140 lbs, you can underbuild, if you weigh 220 lbs, you might want to overbuild it).  Metolius and other sites have basic designs for home walls.  Use deck screws for construction.  I think Escape and Atomik have some decent sets on Amazon to get you started.  

csproul · · Pittsboro...sort of, NC · Joined Dec 2009 · Points: 330
John Byrnes wrote:

It's not just the summer.  The OP is just down the road from me, and I know for a fact that winter can be worse.    I was in a co-op that purpose-built a shed (16x16) to put a climbing wall in.  Poured concrete, framed it, put on the roof, full insulation, skylight, electrical (lights, heat, music), etc.  

We had a fan for summer but going in there in the Winter, after the heat had been off for days, your hands would go numb just waiting for the heaters to make a difference.   The air would get warm rather quickly but the HOLDS were sometimes single digits cold and due to their mass, it takes quite a while for them to warm up!!

Well yeah... true...not much of a real winter here in NC Where I’m at. We have our worst nights in the 20’s, so winter with a garage wall is totally doable. Time for you to switch out your holds for dry tool holds and put some gloves on!

pkeds · · Broomfield, CO · Joined Feb 2006 · Points: 30

Its only worth it if its a moonboard.

Will WB · · Sacramento, CA · Joined Mar 2019 · Points: 270

Just to add a few more pieces of advice from my own experience, some of it redundant from what has been said. For reference, my ceiling is just under 9' and I was able to get a climbing surface (not including the kicker) of h8' 9" x w8', and the whole structure is is just over 8' tall at about 45º. I framed it going 16" on center, making the center of a stud every 16". If you can't fit two pieces of plywood, it's going to be a pretty small wall.

Use the T-nuts that attach with screws. It's a pain to put them all in, but especially if you are moving holds around with any frequency the ones with just some teeth on the back will pop out and you'll just end up replacing them.

Add a kicker but don't make it too big. Mine is 16" and I certainly wouldn't want it any taller given my confined space. I don't really use the bottom half of it and would maybe make it 10-12" if I did it again.

Leave a lip at the top of about 1/4" - 1/2". What I mean is don't make the top of the plywood and the top of the crosspiece of the frame flush. You can sand the plywood to make it soft and rounded, and that way you have a finish hold along the entire top of the wall. I discovered this by mistake as a result of poor craftsmanship. 

If budget is an issue, don't get sucked into buying nice new holds. Are they nice? Yes. Are they necessary? No. Ask gyms if you can buy their old holds, and get a rasp. You'll have lots of little pieces of wood left after building it that can be turned into good enough holds and you can get strips of hardwood from Home Depot to turn into holds. 

Just use 2x6s. If you don't use them for everything, use them for the uprights. 

Mount the plywood sheets perpendicular to the framing. Maybe seems obvious, but if one doesn't have a lot of building experience (clearly I didn't) it may not be. You'll have to line up the middle 2x6 quite precisely otherwise. I've had no problems with it, but why bother giving yourself more work?

A cheap handsaw is fine. You won't have perfect cuts (see pictures) but it will work just fine. 

Terrible Climber · · Unknown Hometown · Joined Nov 2019 · Points: 0

If you live in an area with lots of gyms, ask around for used holds. I got a crazy deal on some lightly used Decoy holds the other day, they’re awesome modern holds, Id reccomend comparing all gyms’ offers before buying, some give very meh deals

Jeffrey Arthur · · Westminster, CO · Joined Mar 2008 · Points: 290

I guess I may be in the minority, but it's not worth it assuming you have access to a climbing gym. Before I moved to CO from NC we had an amazing setup but 15 yrs ago climbing gyms in the Raleigh, NC were terrible (pre-TRC so we only had Raleigh Rock Yard and Vertical Edge). Our home climbing facility was hands down the best personal climbing gym that I've still ever seen inside of a home (I'm excluding any gym inside a barn because there's a lot of great ones). It was two stories tall and 16 feet wide: 15" kickboard, 40 degs for the first story and 20 degs for the second story and 16-ft wide built with no sidewalls so you can use all the space. Behind it was an amazing campus board with the standard large, medium and small rungs including PT rungs when I blew my elbows out. On top of that several hangboards in the same room. Sounds like a dream, but we had (3) climbers living in that house and we all spent almost every weekend in Boone bouldering and the New River Gorge sport climbing. 

So why do I think it's not worth it? Simple, it's not that motivating for most of us to have a climbing wall in the house. Sure you may be motivated now because the thought of building your own climbing wall sounds like a great idea, but my guess is that for most of us 6 months or a year from now most of those walls will just end up taking up too much space in your garage thereby putting your cars in the driveway and at risk for thieves. Most of the time it will just be you climbing on the wall and I found it unmotivating to try hard on a home wall when I was alone. When everyone came over we had a great time, but even after 6 months those became few and far between. I personally find it 1000x's more motivating to walk into a gym and try hard with people that I know and even don't know and without a wall taking up all the space in my house I have a place to keep all $#it that keeps piling up in my garage from kiddo #2 that arrived in June 2020.

Trevor Taylor · · Seattle, WA · Joined Nov 2020 · Points: 0
Jeffrey Arthur wrote:

This seems to be a pretty consistent theme I have seen. My main reason for building one is that when I do have a child I don’t see myself having enough time to go to the gym consistently and the gym isn’t close at all.

Jeffrey Arthur · · Westminster, CO · Joined Mar 2008 · Points: 290
Trevor Taylor wrote:

This seems to be a pretty consistent theme I have seen. My main reason for building one is that when I do have a child I don’t see myself having enough time to go to the gym consistently and the gym isn’t close at all.

Then I would definitely do it. The main point I was making is if you have access to a gym then building a home gym might be more of a space hog and eventually something you’ll drift away from after a while. I’ve got plenty of friends on the Western Slope that built Moonboards and Tension boards shortly after the pandemic hit. 

Guideline #1: Don't be a jerk.

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