Since moving to North Carolina from Oregon, we have been on a very (and I mean extremely) tight budget. At the beginning of the month our friends helped us with our bills because all the moving expenses completely drained our resources. So needless to say, this young married couple hasn't been having very many date nights...
But now that pay checks are starting to stagger in and replenish what we spent to move out here, we are slowly being able to think about furnishing our apartment. I have all these cute ideas in mind (thanks Pinterest) but don't have the money to pull them all off yet. You've gotta start somewhere right? So we decided that maybe starting with the things that demand a certain amount of space should be worked out first. Namely, our bikes.
I wasn't even really into biking until we went down to one car last year and Alex had to start commuting to work. He got super into the whole fixie craze and has since purchased me one (the bottom bike in the above photo) and spends a lot of time researching ways to make his bike cooler. Anyways...our apartment is much bigger than our place in Portland - 755 sq feet - but still not huge. So, we wanted to find the best way to store our bikes inside (we live on the first floor so it would be way to easy to take them off our back porch) without creating a giant contraption of hideousness. Cue Pinterest searching. We found lots of great photos but nothing that made us perfectly satisfied. Finally, Alex came across a photo of a DIY bike rack that used a 2x4x8 that propped against the wall with hooks in it for the bikes.
We set out to Home Depot with our $50 bike rack budget for date night. Once we showed an employee what we were working on, he suggested we just bolt the wood board to the wall with lag screws and skip the part where we would have to build an anchor for the leaning version. Genius. We had the man cut 6 inches off the board (because our ceiling is only 8 feet high we were worried the board would be a tad tall) and went home with our supplies:
1 - 2x4x8 (minus 6 inches) ($2.95)
2 - 5/16 lag screws ($0.60 each)
2 - fold down bike hooks ($6 each)
1 - Behr "maple leaf" paint sample ($3.95)
1 - 8oz can of Minwax Wood Finish in "dark walnut" ($4.98)
1 - paintbrush ($1.15)
Total = $26.23 + tax
We called our buddy Justin to borrow a stud finder and a power screw driver. We started by pre-drilling the board and held it up to pre-drill into the wall for accurate placement where a stud was. Then we painted one coat of the Behr paint, followed by one coat of stain an hour later. We had to let the stain sit for 8 hours to dry thoroughly. The next day, I held the board up while my husband screwed in the lags. Then we attached the bike hooks and voila!
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