Refinement

 

Soon after we moved to this place some 14 years ago, I decided to hang our bicycles from the ceiling. My wife has always insisted that both our cars spend every night pampered inside the garage and so as we added children and bicycles to the mix, it became harder to do. In order to still leave room for all my woodworking equipment, I looked toward the ceiling and came up with a solution. I bought a half dozen of these rope hoists with hooks on the end and used five of them to hang up various bicycles and one to hang up a ladder. It got everything off the floor which allowed both cars to park at night but it had some issues.

The biggest issue is that they were hard to work to lower a bicycle down. The mechanism requires a specific angle of the rope to allow the rope to slide past it and lower the bike down, something my kids and wife never seemed to be able to figure out. This meant that I was always on call to lower a bicycle down or pull it back up. This often resulted for the bicycles leaning against things as seen above, until I needed to access whatever they were leaned against and rehung them only to have them down hours later leaning against something. Another issue was that in order to hang the rope used to hoist them up and down, I had to install them close to the wall, the same wall where my tool box and a bunch of yard implements hang. This meant accessing either of those items meant weaving my head in-between chains, sprockets and wheels while contorting my shoulder so I could reach the item I needed. So recently, I decided to find some alternative solution.

After doing some digging, I came across electric hoists used to hang bicycles from the ceiling. I would still like them up near the ceiling to leave valuable wall space for other things. The hoist has a push button device mounted to the wall right next to the garage door opener that can lower and raise it with a poke of a finger, something even my kids should be able to figure out. The hoist itself didn't come with a really great device for holding the bikes up in a horizontal position so I improvised by buying some axle tie down straps, essentially short straps with metal rings on each end that can be looped here or there on the bike to hold it in a desirable position. 

I installed the hoist away from the wall so I can walk over to my toolbox or wall of yard maintenance tools and grab one without ducking or hitting my head. The hoist gets everything high enough to clear the hood of my wife's car so she can park in the garage at night. The one drawback is that the bikes can't be hoisted high enough for me to walk underneath them but since this isn't an area of my garage I do a lot of woodworking in, it should be fine once I retrain myself to not run into them when I'm not looking up. 

Here is another view with the car removed. You can see my rotating top planer/oscillating sander cart to the right nestled underneath a cabinet and marks the furthest point my woodworking extends to the back of the garage on that half. The back wall reconfigures with the season. Right now it is set to summer mode so the buckets I use for harvesting from the garden and garden cart are accessible along with ladders, hand dolly and wheelbarrow. In the corner covered up is my snowblower. In the winter, the snowblower and garden cart trade places, the buckets get stacked up more neatly so I can access the snowblower without having to back a car out of the garage first. 

I may still try to find someway to hang up the rarely used scooters that belong to my kids on the new hoist, especially over winter. I've thought about utilizing the ceiling even further at some point to hang more stuff up there since it is wide open except for lights. But I know if I did that, I would just stash more things up there gathering dust and so I am going to resist that temptation, at least for now.