(Note: There are lots of pictures down below. It may take some time for them to load.)

Tammy and I were richly blessed in November of 2005 to move into our new apartment. Not only is this new place closer to our church and my office, but it is much nicer than our previous apartment. Best of all, it has a garage.

One drawback to the new location: When we lived in Arlington, we could go to the rock climbing gym (Dyno-Rock) two or three times a week. It is just not feasible for us to make that drive after work and there is no where to climb on our new side of town. What’s a climber to do? Hmm.

Thus hatched a daring plan.

I’m not carpenter (not by a long shot), but when I was growing up on the horse farm, I spent many weekends helping my dad build or repair fences and barns. My primary job was to hold things, but still I was able to pick up a good understanding of how things go together.

You may not know this, but I do have an associate’s degree in engineering. No, I don’t spend my days designing rockets or calculating bridge stresses, but deep down in my brain lurks the knowledge to build things other than web pages.

So, I began researching the process of building a climbing wall. I made a few trips to the new apartment before we moved in, taking measurements of the garage. I talked to the management about the rules for improving our rented space. (Basically, they said as long as you leave it like you found it, we don’t care what you do in between.) I visited home improvement superstores pricing lumber.

Our gym membership expired in October. Climbing regularly ain’t cheap. An annual membership is $350 (and that’s cheap for the market), so it would be $700 for Tammy and I to renew at a gym we might only see on the weekends. Clearly that’s not practical, but, the way I see it, that left me with a $700 build budget. This was going to work!!

New Years Eve fell on a weekend, giving us an extra day, just in case we ran into trouble. With my cleverly drawn Visio diagram in hand, we headed to Lowes on Thursday night. We returned with a grand stack of straight, sturdy dead tree guts: 30 eight foot 2×4’s, 2 twelve foot 2×6’s, and three 3/4″ 4×8 sheets of sanded hardwood plywood (all of which fit in the back of my might Ford Explorer, might I add).

On Friday, my office closed early and I got to work. The first order of business was what I call the “kick board”. The garage is nine feet tall. Standard lumber comes in eight foot lengths. To save on costs, our wall will not touch the floor. Instead it will begin one foot off the ground. The kick board, rather than the floor, will support the downward force of the wall. It needs to be wide enough that the structure of the climbing wall can rest on it. To accomplish this, I screwed two 2×6 boards to the existing studs in the wall. This gives a three inch footing for the rest of the structure. (“Three inches?” you might ask. “Two and two is more than three!” Well, a 2×6 (“two by six”) board is not really two inches by six inches. It’s really about 1.5 by 5.5 inches. Same with 2×4’s.)

Before long, Tammy came home and found me bouncing gleefully in the garage. I had a kick board! I had never really experienced the excitement of building something from scratch. It was already too much to bear.

With my helper at my side, I set about building the first “truss”. Each truss would be made up of an eight foot stud with a notch cut at one end to fit the kick board, two “buttresses” which would transfer the stud’s lateral load to the wall, and an anchor screwed into the existing wall stud. (To all you engineers out there, if I’m using the wrong terms, shut up. I don’t care. I built it and I’m excited. Pbhbphbhb. See? Look at the picture. I’m literally glowing.)

This picture shows how the stud is cut to fit the kick board.

By bed time, we were beginning to perfect our methods and three trusses where hung. It took us a while to figure out the best way to cut the buttresses. The final technique was to notch the stud and put a mark at the desired angle. Then we’d cut the end of a 2×4 to the same angle. While Tammy held the stud at the correct angle (using a level on the above mentioned mark) I would hold the buttress (with the angle cut end against the wall) and mark both the buttress and the stud where they met. I would use this mark to cut the buttress to length and then screw it to the anchor and stud where I had marked. There was no need for the buttresses to be precise, so that gave us some leeway.

We woke Saturday morning with great enthusiasm. After breakfast at the Waffle House, we got back to work. In no time the first panel was finished. This end panel was hung at thirty degrees. That’s fairly aggressive for a woody (armature, home, climbing wall). The next two panels would hang at fifteen degrees.

We only tacked the plywood with four screws. We marked the back of the plywood along the studs. Later, we would remove the plywood to add holes and tee nuts for the climbing holds. By marking where the studs would be, we could avoid drilling any holes that would conflict with the studs. Also notice our highly efficient system for holding the plywood in place while I tacked it in place: a tool box and piece of scrap 2×4.

Obviously, building anything in your garage can cause a problem with your garage’s primary purpose: parking your car. Here we see that Daisy (Tammy’s Xterra) fits easily. *Whew*

With our technique down there was not much more to do, but to do it. We soldiered on, marking, cutting, and drilling. (Oh, and sweeping… after every cut… apparently it’s a Wallar thing… don’t ask.)

One fifteen degree panel down (er up). One more to go. Tammy was great help. She’s really strong and (more importantly) patient.

It was mid afternoon and while my mind was still flooded with excitement, my arms and hands were less enthusiastic.

Here Tammy marks the position of the next stud footing. Amazingly enough, the measurements worked and our wall would exactly fit on the kick board: twelve feet to the inch.

With the sun setting, we got the last truss in place. Between making 30-something cuts and drilling in almost 100 screws (half of them above my head), my arms where exhausted. Even with good power tools, this was a long day’s work. I gained a new respect for the real carpenters out there who frame whole houses in just a few days.

Phase one of our climbing wall was complete. We were tired, but dying to climb. After a day of rest (and church) on Sunday, we used our Monday holiday to hit the old gym.

Read on to Vol. II.

(You can see a few images that didn’t make the final cut.)