Arêtes and other complicated features can be novel to climb on a few times but for training purposes they tend to lock you into the same set of moves, restrict crossways movement, allowing for stems, rests and head-butts … and it’s probably best to avoid them unless you have loads of space. The K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) rule usually reigns supreme in so many cases. 

I drew up a small plan for this wall, after we’d finally gotten the floor installed to carefully examine the different possibilities of building a barrel/box feature next to the 50º space.  Having a 16’ x 16’ 50º wall seemed like too much wall at that angle, so why not mix it up? Having the large feature had some negative drawbacks though. It would close the space in a bit, restricting movement for more than several boulderers, and leave us with a big, gross, dihedral panel. 

Eventually after much deliberation, and beer, we decided that it would best to keep it flush and add “volumes” to the wall, which would allow us to continually change the flow, and add any feature wanted to build. Volumes are individual features built from the same plywood and framing materials you used to build your wall. Volumes can be constructed in any shape like a hanging tufa, a pyramid, a box, any size, spun in any direction, holding dozens of holds — the options are endless. We decided adding volumes later would let us get climbing ASAP and give the most flexibility to our wall.

Unfortunately there were a few complications that would make the job a little more work. The first problem?  No floor, just a big header-beam running down the middle of the room that rose above the floor joists about 10 inches. Normally, you’d just sheet out the floor and call it good. But with exposed electrical wiring and that big beam in the middle it was decided that the safest option was to build a 10” high sub floor which would keep climbers from falling on the back-breaking garage beam. 

So, finally it began, one dark and wintery evening in November. I enlisted some of my taller climber friends to help construct the first phase of the woodies sub floor. The biggest challenge was lifting the sheets through a 4’ x 2’ crawlspace from the garage to the attic. We accomplished this by unhooking one of the struts from the fold-up ladder and passed the sheets up at an angle one by one with two people pushing the sheet up and two people lifting it through the opening. 

The system was working perfectly until someone (whose name shall be omitted from this report) slipped and busted through the ceiling into the garage, narrowly missing our Subaru WRX. Luckily he survived the episode unharmed and we continued the moving project after we patched up the ceiling with a little duct tape. Not having a floor up there made it quite dangerous, so everything needed to be done extra slow and cautious like until we had a place to walk around.