Setting up a garage bike store

Bikes are the floor problem in most garages

A bike on the floor takes its own length and width, plus the space you need to get past it, plus the bike leaning on it. Three bikes leaning against a wall fill a single garage side to side, and getting the middle one out means moving two. It is the clearest case of the thing every garage project comes down to: the floor is scarce, the walls are free, and a bike is the single biggest object you can move from one to the other.

What stops people is not the mount, it is the wall and the lift. A bike hung on the wall has to go up there, by the person who rides it, at the end of a wet ride, and it has to come down without taking the next bike with it. Plan the store around that: who lifts, how heavy the bike is, where the car door swings and where the garage door reaches.

Which mount for which bike

There are three ways to hang a bike and one way not to. A vertical hook holds it by the front wheel, nose up, and uses the least wall width. A horizontal mount holds it by the frame, flat against the wall, and takes wall length but almost no depth. A rotating arm holds it by the top tube on a pivot so it swings out to get at and folds flat when the car needs the space. The way not to hang a bike is by anything the manufacturer says not to.

The frame decides. A carbon frame, a heavily sloped top tube and a full-suspension frame with no straight run of tube all argue against a frame mount, and a heavy e-bike argues against lifting it above waist height at all. Check what the maker says about hanging your bike before you buy the mount, and measure the widest part — usually the bars — against the wall space you have.

Spacing, height and the door

Bikes hung in a row at the same height fight each other at the bars and the pedals. Stagger them, one high and one low, so the bars of one sit above the saddle of the next and the bikes overlap instead of clashing. That gets more bikes onto a wall than the mounts alone suggest, and it is the reason to mark the wall with tape and hold each bike up to it before drilling anything.

Hang each bike at the height its rider can lift it to. That is lower than the pictures show, and lower again for an e-bike, which is why the heaviest bike takes the lowest mount or stays on the floor on a stand. Keep the run of wall inside the up-and-over door clear; the door panel and its track occupy the ceiling and the first metre of wall as it opens, and a bike hung there gets hit every time the door goes up.

If the car stays in the garage, the bikes go on the wall the car door does not open towards, or above the height of the door, or on a rotating mount that folds flat when the car is in. Park the car, open the door to its first stop and mark the floor before choosing the wall; a bike that hangs where the door swings is a dent in the door and a bent pedal, and it happens on the first wet night, not after a year.

The wall matters more than the mount

A bike mount is a lever. It hangs the weight out from the wall, and the fixing at the top is doing far more than holding the bike up. Into single-skin brick, proper frame fixings hold well. Into breeze block or thermalite, standard plastic plugs crumble the block and work loose, so use anchors made for lightweight block. Into dot-and-dab plasterboard there is a void behind the board, and a fixing that grips the board is holding nothing: find the masonry behind it or fix a batten through to it.

The fixings in the box, where there are any, are chosen for a wall the supplier imagined. Buy to suit the wall you have. For a row of bikes on a stud wall, a timber batten screwed through into several studs and the mounts screwed into the batten is easier and stronger than hunting for a stud behind each one, and it lets you move a mount later without a new set of holes.

Kit off the floor too

The bikes go up and the floor under them fills with helmets, shoes, the pump, a bottle of chain lube and a box of tubes. Hooks take the helmets and the pump above shoulder height; a pair of gridwall panels takes baskets for gloves and shoes and can be rearranged as the family's bikes change; a clear-fronted drawer cabinet takes the small spares — cleats, links, brake pads, valve cores — where you can see them instead of remembering them.

E-bike batteries are the one item to take indoors. A cold garage in winter drops below the temperature many makers say to charge at, and a battery that spends every night at that temperature ages faster. Check the manufacturer's charging range and bring the battery in when the garage heads towards it. Wipe a wet bike down before it goes up; a dripping bike hung over the car is a car with a stripe on it.