Several months ago, my apartment's secure car park was hit by a spate of bicycle thefts. Over a period of 6 weeks, about 8 bicycles were stolen during the nights and of course- my Giant Iguana MTB was one of them, despite the cable lock I had securing it (they cut straight through it).
So with the purchasing of our new bikes, there was no way in hell I was going to put them back down in the car park- no matter what lock we have. So for several weeks after picking up our bikes they lived in the lounge of our small 1 bedroom apartment which was annoying to say the least. We didn't want to put them out on the balcony as they would end up getting wet and we really wanted to take good care of the bikes.
After some digging about online I found a nice solution that would store the bikes one above each other up against the wall on the balcony with minimal drilling (we are renters). With the bikes up against the wall, they would be out of the rains reach and keep our small balcony reasonably bike free. The only problem was that this storage system came in at around the $200 mark. OUCH!
A quick visit to the Ikea website saw a similar solution for only $77, and with a simple 10 minutes of installation and we were all set.
It works really well although I wish the hooks that hold the actual bikes could be locked into position rather than them swiveling from side to side, but this is a minor point really. The other great thing about the storage solution is I can use it as a repair stand. Very sweet!
Friday, August 24, 2007
Apartment bike storage on a budget
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6 comments:
Damn- I love IKEA! You are hooked on bike gear already.... how cool is it! Thats smell when you walk into the bike shop is awesome *sniff* *sniff* :)
good solution. i assume people can't get access to your balcony easily?
Not unless they can climb up 3 floors of balconies and somehow get the bikes down (from withing a secure courtyard in the apartment block). But I'm gonna get a cable lock to lock them together to make it even harder to steal all the same.
I'm there! Thanks vidman!
do you have any plans or drawings of how you created this with the Ikea parts? pretty awesome.
This is a very good post which I really enjoyed reading.Vertical bike racks
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