Bike cellar/workshop/man cave

I always preferred to use the first clamp posted. It is much easier to adjust and less of a faff. I am a mechanic and was working on 8-15 bikes a day, always made sure my stand had the top clamp.

I find the bottom one a bit too fiddly for my liking.

You are using a sledgehammer to knock holes in plasterboard?

Do you cut your bread with a saw, and butter it with a table tennis paddle?

This workshop would be absolutely fantastic for storing bodies.

^^ Thanks both, that's the kind of feedback I was after, I read up on the technical differences but still wasn't sure which one I wanted. I wondered if the bottom one was better for fancy frames (as I have a carbon road bike and a Gilco Colnago) but I clamp them both by the seatpost anyway.

This guy sure loves his PRS-4W 1...

Bike Repair Stand - Park Tool PRS-4W - 1 Wall Mount - BikemanforU Kapooyah! - YouTube

Dammit I cut my bread with a laser and I shake up a cow before applying the butter direct...

I was knocking down a wall though! But would admit that I used the sledgehammer a lot less than I thought I would and my wrecking bar a lot more. Once the plasterboard was off there were a lot of studs and that doorway to get rid of and often things needed a good whack...

So, onwards! This is what it looked like after the builders had gone, and I was about to install the (very much necessary) wine rack:

You can see the latex self-levelling compound still drying out at this point.

This workshop would be absolutely fantastic for storing bodies.

Well it is a nice dry cellar... It's well ventilated and I think that helps a lot, unlike many places nobody ever blocked up the original victorian ventilation.

I should get it off my chest that from an old building point of view I should really have had it repointed with lime mortar and had it lime washed, and as Optimate said put in a suspended timber floor. Victorian building purists would view this as a bit of a bodge.

But as it's so dry I took the view that turning a victorian coal cellar into a workshop is always going to be a bit of a bodge: it was never intended for this purpose and I'm fairly confident it's dry enough for just the blackjack to keep any moisture back. Plus this way was pretty cheap really, all other ways of doing it would have been a lot pricier...

I'm very jealous Pete!

What are you going to store under the staircase?

Moar wine racks.

What flooring are you going to lay?

^^^ Bodies.

Actually this is still TBC, we have been keeping stuff under them but not in an organised way, I want to make the most of the space, which is quite handy.

Thanks spotter. This is when it starts getting more exciting actually!

Could you not extend every second step backwards to make a nice shelving unit? Also painted floor or rubber matting?

Flooring, don't know. It's still the latex compound at the moment but it has some cracks so is offending the perfectionist in me. It has to get approval from the other half which complicates things too. He insists on 'pure simple lines'. I quite like the stuff BN used but that doesn't meet the criteria apparently.

Painted/rubber is definitely a possibility. I fancied one of those poured rubber floors but apparently they're very expensive.

The self levelling compound isn't tough enough to leave on it's own- it'll fail in high traffic areas.

Yep, I hadn't been told that but had figured it. Also at least one of the cracks was caused by me dropping a heavy tool on the floor, it didn't like that...

Ikea do these brackets for sloping walls which I've used elsewhere in the cellar (more later), could work on the back of the stairs:

The final thing the builders did was put a new piece of plasterboard in at the top of the stairs, as before it looked like this because the old tenant upstairs had let the bath overflow:

They also ripped off the old plasterboard on the wall opposite this and painted the bare brick, which looks much nicer.

After they did that they got a corrupt gas fitter to move the gas meter onto this wall, as before you were greeted with it in front of you when you opened the cellar door and it was kinda in the way.

The official way to do is to pay the gas board £800 or £900 and they cut off the gas to the whole street in the middle of the night. So obviously nobody does this, they do it 'live' instead. I did make sure I was at least four miles away that day though..!

They did a nice job of boxing the meter in too, with a little window to see the numbers and a cut out for the cut off switch:

Damn, I want a cellar.

From experience....it'll get damn dusty if you don't block up the voids that lead to floor joists...if you do block up remember to put in vents.

great stuff, my cellar is not deep enough to stand in, thought about digging down but think ti would be too much grief.
loving the scaffold board shelving.

I have a gas meter that needs moving- could you pm me how much it cost and who did it?

I'm an old building purist, but so long as you don't do anything irreversible to the Victorian fabric of the house, I think it's great to make use of all the space. I wouldn't have done concrete, but I hope it doesn't cause you problems now it's been done.

Floor-wise, arguably it's more practical to have something soft for this sort of workshop. Not only will you drop things on it, but you wouldn't want, for example, to damage a frame if you dropped that on something unforgiving. If you've sorted out the drainage, what about cork? It's really cheap, so can be replaced when shabby. Also, you can get it in white, which satisfies the 'simple' criterion.

White would be handy in order to spot where the tiny part has run away too.

The tiny part will always find a nice dark corner to hide.