My GF and myself are considering a lovely mid-terraced house around Woolwich. It’s really great except for the fact that it has nowhere to store bikes properly (we both ride). We can possibly clear the front garden to lock the bikes in front, with ground anchors, turrets, etc, and find an easy way to cover them from the elements.
However, because I do try and maintain the bikes myself we need to find a way to get the bikes fairly easily to the oversized garden on the back where there is shed. This would also be handy when we go on holidays.
Anyway, is anyone doing this? Do you drive the bike through the living room and kitchen to get to the garden? Do you use bike ramps with wheels etc? how do you not ruin the wooden floors etc? Any other sensible ideas (crane from the garden to the road???)
Get yourself some cheap crappy carpet and lay it down before you wheel the bikes through. Also, get your floor tested for how much weight it can take (your bike’s weight + your weight + any furniture you have to go past + 20KG just to be safe).
Good luck with the house purchase and I hope it works out for you.
I thought bikes would be around 200kg, which is 100kg per wheel. The equivalent roughly of me hopping on one foot around the house. I think the floor can take that (or at least should…)
I was more thinking of dirtiing the floor with the wheels, or scratching it with pebbles stuck in the treads… And if you see the house pic (just added it), the entrance door is a bit high, so will need a ramp or something to get it up there.
If you’re both into bikes & looking to buy a place, why not just find somewhere more bike friendly ie. with a garage or at least with access to the back garden?
I’ve wheeled bikes through terraced houses before & the tricky bit has always been the dog leg in the hall at the foot of the stairs, normally doable but fiddly for something small &/or narrow but no way I’d have got a 600/1000 sports bike through.
Gonna be tricky even getting it to the front door there though.
Just a thought, does it have a basement? If so you could possibly open it up so as to fit an entrance into it from the front garden.
I suggest you get a couple of mates round and just lift them up the steps. Then just wheel/shove it through the house… I’d have thought the floor would be fine so long as there are no stones wedged in the tyres etc…
A ramp would be too steep for those front steps, and the step up to the door doesn’t look square on so you wouldn’t get the bike through the door that way…
If you have a quick look at the part A of building regulations approved documents you’ll probably get the necessary info for loading on joist floors but I can’t imagine a 200kg bike would be an issue. You could lay ply sheets to spread the load over a few boards if there’s any concern.
From the look of the curved path leading to the front steps, I don’t think you’ll get a bike round the corner and up the incline anyway. Perhaps you should look at setting up a gantry crane over the house
You have to bare in mind a lot of the houses in london are old and the floor wasn’t designed for a bike. If the house isn’t done up yet you can always take one of the floorboards up to see how close the joists are together. Bare in mind the average man weighs between 70-120kg.
100kg (person) + bike (200kg) + 20KG + whatever furniture thats a lot of weight for a floor to take unless its concrete underneath. I know older wood gets stronger but thats a lot of weight.
True. If you’re buying it rather than just renting for a short while you will get mightily fed up of trying to get bikes in & out. Just the thought of what you do with the dustbin & garden rubbish puts me off those houses.
I don’t think many new houses are designed to take the weight of a bike either Daniel
If you compare it my sofa, 4 people can sit on it and it has 4 legs - that gives potentially 400+kg (depending on how lardy my friends are) on 4 legs over about 1.5m2, which is pretty similar to a reasonably lardy man standing next to a motorbike. If it were me, I’d probably consider running the bike over strips of plyboard to spread the load a bit and protect the floor - maybe cut it into 600mm wide rips.
If you can get at the floor joists to measure them(and ensure the timber is sound) then you can roughly work out the likely loading capacity using the old part A building regs - appendix A of this document http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/uploads/br/BR_PDF_AD_A_1992.pdf. The minimum seems to be 0.25kN/m2 of dead load (allowance for furniture etc.), presumably there’s some live load allowance (for people) but it’s running very slow on my laptop so I can’t find it. All quite simple maths if you read the info.
Getting the bikes up the steps is a bigger problem imo. I’d never bother with the effort involved bring a bike through the house myself.
In The Netherlands all terrace houses have an alley way at the back that leads to the house so that you can put your bicycles, scooters and motorcycles in the shed. Those Dutch are real forward thinkers.
It looks indeed that the main challenge will be getting it through the door. I was thinking one big ramp… But yeah, I take the “buy elsewhere” point. I was just hoping that, given the number of terraced houses in the country, some biker somewhere came up with a solution I never heard of.
I am going to visit at least 8 houses tomorrow, including this one (which I saw last week, but without my partner), they will all have some form of access to the garden, and one of them a garage, but they have other things that are not quite up to par compared to this one.
This is so frustrating. Cagers do have it easy in this regard :w00t:
