Hanging around

Phase 2 began today. I’ve been rather enjoying my garage of late. Every time I go in there, I’m surprised at how spacious it is, how well organized. You could eat your dinner in there if you didn’t mind your dinner being generously seasoned with brick dust and grass seed.
The one fly in the ointment is the bikes, haphazardly scattered around the garage, taunting me. So when the new bike mounts arrived, I was delighted.
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll be well aware that no purchase can be made without an intensive session on Google, researching options, comparing prices, and quite often looking at unrelated videos that I swear were relevant when I clicked on them. In this case, I was accompanied by Sue on my journey as we explored the myriad ways people seem to have invented for sticking a bike on a wall. At the low end, you start with Halfords. It’s not sophisticated. You get a hook. If you want to mount than one bike, you get a slightly longer hook. This was an easy one to eliminate, as we’d already tried it, twice. We now have one bike hook that we store the plastic recyling bag on, and another off the rafters at the back of the garage that Sue refuses to use because she claims that the incredibly expensive bike she bought because its so light is too heavy to lift onto it.
Moving past the simple hooks, the next option is semi-vertical bike racks. These are the options you get at stations: metal rails permanently affixed at a 45 degree angle that you roll your bike up, then lock in place with a back stop. Fantastically efficient, fantastically professional, take up more space that if we were to store the bikes without them. Since the aim is to create more space, we instantly rejected them.
Next, we moved on to the proper, bike cycling half way up the wall, bike mounts. These are the kind of thing you used to see in hipster offices in Shoreditch. A cross between storage and art installation, the kind of bike rack Damien Hearst would choose. A bike rack that says ‘I cycle to work and make my own organic cider and I really want you to know about it.”
Naturally, this is the one we decided to got for. Although, with one minor adjustment. We picked one that swivels. A very simple change to the standard design and one that I’m amazed isn’t the only design: instead of jutting straight out from the wall and causing you to duck every time you want to get to the tumble drying, once you mount your bike on the fitting, you can swing it to the side and against the wall. This was the one, the space saving device we wanted.
All I had to do was mount it.