Design

Designing the wall is perhaps the trickiest and most critical step in building a home gym; it’s where you take your dreamy vision and turn it into a concrete plan filled with details, measurements and wall angles.

 

Perhaps the easiest way to begin transforming your vague ideas into concrete designs is to sketch what you hope the finished product will look like—by making a simple drawing of how your wall will look when it’s built. When drawing, don’t forget to include the actual room, basement or structure in which you plan to build your wall. Include door, duct, light fixture, electrical outlet and window locations.

Once you’ve created a decent sketch, it’s time to start locking in on some of the details—you can do this by adding them to your sketch. Useful details include:

• height and width of the room
• angle of the wall
• wall stud locations (if known)
• anticipated pad location and dimensions

 

Having added these concrete details to your sketch, you should be able to calculate the height and width your wall. To do this, you’ll need to use basic geometry. (Remember sine, cosine and tangent? If you don’t, find a friend who does.) At this point in the design phase, you should be able to catch early mistakes in your ideas, and adjust your plans to fix them.

Once you are satisfied with the location, dimensions and angle of your wall, you can attempt to add more structural details to your sketch. At this point, you should consider your wall’s frame: how you will anchor it to your wall’s parent structure, how the frame will be constructed, and other details, such as how far apart your studs will be.

Note: when designing your wall, you should allow yourself enough space to access the back (non-holds) side of the wall, if possible. T-nuts can pop out of place or become cross-threaded, and will need to be replaced; you must be able to access the back of the wall to replace and repair t-nuts. If your wall will be in a tiny space, consider building a door into your wall that will allow you to access its back side for repairs.

Now it's on to the logistics of building the wall.  Gather