Gye Greene's Thoughts

Gye Greene's Thoughts (w/ apologies to The Smithereens and their similarly-titled album!)

Monday, February 01, 2010

Curtain of tricycles

So, the shed has been built, and I'm trying to load it up -- but in an efficient manner.

The kids have a fair number of tricycles and other vehicles, which are only used occasionally (we don't have any sidewalks; I need to lay some sort of brick or concrete riding trail for the kids), but which were taking up a fairly large corner of the shed.

Solution: the Curtain of Tricycles. (Photo at left.)

Basically, I have a series of hooks tied in to lengths of rope at strategic heights. Except for the unicycle (which is on my To Learn list), everything is low enough for my wife to reach to unhook, in case I'm not home. Some items are hung by a loop of rope, rather than directly by a hook (i.e. the hook connects to the loop of rope, which passes through the item).

This works out pretty well, as two or three items can be stored vertically, in the space of one.


Because the roof beams are made of folded-over metal (in a trough formation), I was concerned that concentrating weight at a single point might, at some point, cause the bearm to buckle. I also didn't want to beam to cut through the rope.

My solution was to nail a short stack of scrap 2" x 4"s whereever I intended to hang an item. This distributes the load, as well as raises the loop of the rope above the edges of the beam.


Saved a heck of a lot of space!


--GG

5 Comments:

At February 18, 2010 2:19 AM, Blogger slag said...

Good on ya. I like it. Although how heavy are tricycles anyway?

 
At February 18, 2010 9:46 PM, Blogger Gye Greene said...

Thanks! :)

Tricycle weight: Individually, not much. But it's about a 3x5 array (3 high by five wide) -- concentrated in a fairly narrow (five foot?) span. So it adds up...


--GG

 
At March 11, 2010 12:34 PM, Anonymous Giovanni said...

If you lived in the CITY I bet you'd have access to sidewalks (as well as the other amenities possible due to denser populations, such as libraries, cute ice cream shops, bus service, etc.). People living in the country costs more for tax payers (more road length per household, more phone line/electrical line distance per household, farther for emergency services to travel, etc.). But I guess you're less likely to have loud neighbors waking you up...

 
At March 11, 2010 10:10 PM, Blogger Gye Greene said...

Giovanni,


Sometime I should introduce you to Slag, when we're all in town. She thinks that people should all live in high-density cities, and leave the rural/forested areas alone.

I'm not sure I'm **rural** -- any more than someone two miles outside of downtown Marysville is. We're just a little pocket of acreage, with ''regular'' suburbs on all sides.

Downtown has worse air. We have lots of trees in our backyard, processing CO2 for the world.


--GG

 
At March 12, 2010 11:12 AM, Blogger Gye Greene said...

Additional thoughts:

Depends on what you mean by ''in the city''. If you mean ''downtown'', I don't think I'd enjoy that.

If you mean ''like where our parents live'' -- note that your former in-laws, our paternal grandparents, and your former house with Stan and his kilns all were ''in town'' -- yet none had sidewalks. And I'm not going to have my kids ride their trikes in the street.

A more straightforward, and cost-effective, solution would be to just lay some bricks or paving stones in a ''bike trail'' out back. Makes **much** more sense than selling our house and buying a new one elsewhere, just so the kids can ride their trikes -- eh? :)


--GG

 

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