A climbing wall in a UK garage

A garage is the usual place a home wall ends up, and it is the usual place the drawing fails. The failure is almost never the holds. It is the door, the car, or a ceiling that is tall at the back and low under the tracks.

Measure the garage you have

Ignore the estate-agent width. Take a tape to the masonry.

• Width between the piers or the side walls, at the height the frame will sit. A socket, a consumer unit or a run of trunking can steal the last 100 mm.
• Depth from the wall you will climb on to the inside of the door in its closed position. If the wall is on the side, measure to the opposite side, and then again to the door's swing.
• Height at the top fixing, and again under any door gear, purlin or light. The lower number is the one the panel has to live with.
• Floor along the landing. Many garage slabs fall towards the door. A mat on a slope rocks.

Write the three numbers down and put them in the fit planner before you look at hold photos.

The door is part of the wall

An up-and-over door swings into the garage as it opens. A canopy door's panel arcs through the space a kicked-out climbing wall wants. A sectional door stays closer to the opening, but the horizontal tracks hang down and can set the real ceiling for the first metre or two of the room.

If the planner's run-out is more than about 1.5 m, go and open the door with a broom held where the kicker would be. If the door hits the broom, the wall and the door are arguing, and the door will win on the day you need the car out. Gravelmead is the sister site for the door itself: type, tracks and the space they take.

Parking is the same argument with a larger object. A steep board and a car in a single garage only coexist if the car is out while you climb, and if the mat can live somewhere when the car is in. A mat you have to drag clear of an up-and-over arc will, in practice, not be there for the session.

Headroom against a real board

Moon publishes a standard DIY MoonBoard at 40° as 3174 mm high, 2440 mm wide and 2353 mm deep, and tells you to add matting and a fall zone on top of the build-guide envelope. A garage whose door head is under 2.4 m cannot take that board at that angle. It might take a shorter panel, a Mini MoonBoard (Moon's published DIY mini at 40° is 2020 mm high, 2440 mm wide and 1569 mm deep, again before matting), or a wall you design to the height you measured.

Tension's home sizes are published in feet, height by width, from 10×8 up to 12×16. A 12 ft tall layout is a tall garage. Kilter's homewall layouts start at 7×10 ft. None of these are "a bit of plywood on the end wall" unless the end wall is actually that big.

Damp, cold and a plywood skin

Garages get wet from the car, from a driving rain on the door, and from condensation when the room is colder than the house. The sheet stamp is the document that matters. Plywood is graded for a use class. A humid garage wants a sheet the maker rates for humid conditions. An interior-only sheet will move, and a T-nut in a swollen hole stops being a T-nut.

Leave a ventilated gap behind the panel if the back is an outside wall. Trapping damp plywood against cold brick is how a wall becomes compost. The frame, not the cladding of the garage, should carry the climbing loads. That fixing is covered in brick, block and stud.

Chalk and a car share dust badly. A spare broom and a mat you can actually lift (see the mat guide) matter more than another set of tiny crimps.

A sensible garage order

1. Measure width, depth, the low ceiling and the door arc.
2. Run the planner at the angle you think you want, then again 15° steeper.
3. Decide whether the car still lives there.
4. Only then price plywood, T-nuts and holds.

If step 3 fails, a side-wall strip, a hangboard, or a board in another room is the honest project. Forcing a full 40° layout into a single garage by deleting the mat from the drawing is how ankles meet concrete.