Sky’s the Limit

Well Patricia is growing like a weed!  She is already in 6 month outfits!  Wow!  She is so adorable when she smiles, and she is just starting to test out her laugh. Julius loves to snuggle with her, especially in his old crib, and he is all around a great big brother.  He has been using the word “cute” a lot to describe things.  For instance he said the other day, “Patricia is pretty cute, I love her mama”.  Just melts my heart.  I hope the sibling rivalry doesn’t start anytime soon.  As an added bonus he told me today before bed that I am “the cutest mama”.  He is just earning brownie points left and right.

My two lovies

Two weeks ago we started Patricia in the baby merlin and we’ve been able to get some sleep.  Well theoretically we should be able to, but now I’ve just been staying up way too late every night instead of going to bed at a reasonable time.  You see, I have been reorganizing the garage for the last few weeks.  I’ve finally gotten it good enough to call “done” for now.   Three days ago we moved all our holiday decorations from the basement to the garage.  This means more room for my crafts in the basement… Will is totally okay with this because recently I added more shelves to the man cave for his board games.  When I’m done reorganizing I promise to show you.  I have SO MANY things to show you!  And so many fun projects to work on!  There really isn’t enough time in the day.

Anyway, my whole reason for reorganizing the garage was to fit in the climbing wall I made for Julius for Christmas.  It was supposed to be a birthday gift but I didn’t finish it in time.  And in all honesty I bought the climbing holds in the very beginning of the pandemic.  He kept asking about “the tumble bus” which is this neat school bus that they retrofitted with a bunch of kids’ gymnastics equipment.  They used to come to his daycare every few weeks and he LOVED it.  I thought about renting it for an hour for his birthday and then calculated that I could build a climbing wall for the same price.  I was wrong there… but I’ll get into that in a bit.

My plan started out with buying a few tumble mats, some gymnastic rings, and climbing holds, and me creating a sort of collapsible mobile climbing wall jungle gym type thing using reclaimed wood from pallets.  If I had executed this plan it would have cost me half the price of a tumble bus rental.  So I bought all the things and then they sat around in my basement for a couple months.  Then I acquired a half dozen pallets and got to work ripping them apart.  By this point I was six months pregnant and huge.  I don’t know if you know, but ripping pallets apart is HARD WORK.  Over the course of a weekend I managed to rip 2 of them apart.  Then I gave up.  A lot of the wood splintered from me ripping it apart and I quickly realized that I was going to need A LOT of pallets to build anything decent sized.

So then I started thinking some more.  Why couldn’t I build one in the garage?  I first thought I would just directly attach the climbing wall holds to the outside wall of the mancave stairs.  I may still do this someday but instead I decided to mount them on the unfinished wall under the stairs.  This had the added advantage that Julius could still climb when the cars were parked in the garage.  (Provided I moved around some stuff in the garage a bit – hence the last few weeks).

Top left is the original wall I intended to use. Back is the wall I eventually decided to use.

My parents braved home depot in the pandemic with their suburban to buy me a 4’x8′ sheet of plywood.  I got super good quality 3/4″ plywood with minimal core voids, and a finished face like this.  This cost me $50.  To mount it to the wall I bought a box of spax #8 2″ t-star screws. That cost another $10.  I cut the plywood down to size, drilled holes in the plywood for the climbing holds, carefully measuring and interspersing them between the studs.  After securing all the holds, Will helped me lift it up onto the wall and I screwed it into place.

Holes drilled for the climbing wall.

Drilled holes for the climbing holds and attached t-nuts

Climbing wall before padding. Note the big concrete bump out below.

Then as I was admiring my work, I realized I needed some serious padding since the tumble mats were not going to cut it for a fall from the wall.  (Or at least they were not going to give me peace of mind.)  I purchased a cheap (in climbing mat terms) portable crash pad that cost me another $175…

Finished climbing wall with padding.

Then I realized this still wouldn’t cut it.  The place where I was mounting the climbing wall had a big cement lip from the foundation.  A fall on that lip might be worse than a fall on the floor… so using this awesome guide from the foam factory I dropped another $125 on 4″ 2.8lb open-cell foam for the core, 2″ 2.2lb closed-cell foam for the top and spray adhesive to connect it.  (I probably could have spent a bit less to pad this lip, but I am going to use the leftover foam to make another couple crash pads.  I could have spent even less if I had just done this instead of buying the portable crash pad… oh well.)

Fully padded lip – foam adhered using spray adhesive.

Finally, to mount the rings I still needed a couple heavy duty brackets… and Will suggested a bell for the climbing wall… Ultimately our garage playground/climbing wall cost me a grand total of $560.  The same price as two 1 hour rentals of the tumble bus… expensive but not too bad I suppose.  Let’s hope we get more use out of it than 2 hours though…

Checking out his new present.

Little man excited to climb.

Ringing the bell

Climbing wall tucked out of the way. Just need to push the wagon away and flip down the crash pad to start climbing