House Hacking Project: Overhead Rack

Who can’t use more storage? Especially in the garage right? We thought so, and we installed an overhead garage rack. It pays to shop around, we found Costco has this even cheaper. Anyhow, purchasing the kit is the easy part. Most folks buy them installed, but that can double the costs. Being handy, we opted to install one ourselves.

We ran into a bit of a snag: no studs to hang the brackets in our desired location. These things happen in home improvement. Our workaround was to laminate mounting boards to the ceiling first, using these fancy drywall anchors. With an 80lb capacity per anchor, we used six per board. This yields us an estimated 960lbs worth of storage. (I think we have around 150lbs, including the rack.) Consideration for keeping weight down is a must in this application. Using drywall alone as the sole load bearing material is not ideal. That said, if we aimed for studs the rack position would not be feasible.

Rack bolted to our installed mount.

Measuring was the most time consuming task in this project. Once that was done, anchors were installed, boards mounted, then rack assembled.

The finished product! This rack helped us move a ton of stacked, “in the way” stuff from the garage floor to the ceiling. It would have been nice to paint the bare wood, but the garage is not entirely finished off. Another project for another weekend 😉

No studs in this location either, so we used the same method to hang hooks for a beach cruiser. It stays inside and looks like new!

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