Today I installed a pulley system for getting our bikes in the garage off the floor. If you've ever seen ads for things like this (big hooks being more common) they usually feature an attractive women in "work-out clothes" one hand on the bicycle as if she had just hung it up. Two things: unless she is a lot stronger than she looks and/or the bicycle is a $4000 10 lb. bike, she did not just get done hanging it up with one hand. Two, often these photographs seem to be done in 12-foot garages where hanging the bike by the front tire places it completely out of the way.
Since neither of these facts apply to our garage situation, we grabbed a kit that makes a simple pulley system with lowering hooks to grab under the front handlebars and the seat. We've got two of them installed in such a way that the bikes are out of the way but we can still get them down easily enough. (We realized during the planning process that the bikes needed a place to "land" when we wanted them down. For example, though hanging them above the car would save space we would have to move the car every time we wanted them down. This definitely made finding a good spot a big more tricky.)
I wouldn't say that raising the bike is trivial with this system but it is possible for Katie to do it without too much effort. So far my only complaint is that the rope seems to tend to slide out of the grooves in the pulley when its not being loaded down. We'll see if this ends up being a pain over the long-term.
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