There’s no doubt that In the Same Boat and Tamia Nelson’s Outside readers are a mighty talented bunch. When, nearly six years ago, I wrote an article on storing boats at home, I imagined I’d exhausted the topic, but reader David Birren quickly proved me wrong. By sharing his ideas for inside and outside storage, he prompted me to write a second article. And then… I’ll bet you can see where this is going, can’t you? Other readers wrote in with their suggestions, and a third article soon followed. In fact, every time I published a column on boat storage, I thought that it would surely be the last. Yet each column elicited a wealth of new ideas from readers, every one of them as imaginative as it was novel. It goes without saying that I’d hate to pick the best. In fact, I doubt that there’s any such thing. Each reader’s solution to the storage problem reflects his unique circumstances. That means it’s the best — for him. Consider the example of Stephen Parker of Burnet, Texas. At first glance, his strategy for storing boats may seem a bit Rube Goldberg (UK paddlers read “Heath Robinson”). Don’t be fooled, though. It’s eminently practical as well as wonderfully ingenious. But why don’t I just let Stephen tell the story in his own words?

The whole thing started with my wife saying, “Why don’t you stick that thing up in the attic or something to get it out of the way?”

A eureka moment, obviously. And the result? The kayak attic was born. Stephen takes up the tale again:

Here is my solution for storing my kayak. I call it my “Kayak Attic.” My house is all steel frame so I decided to make use of some wasted space in the garage. I used a lot of scrap pieces for bracing my kayak attic, so it looks sort of thrown together, but it was a good way to recycle the odd offcuts from other projects and avoid throwing them in the scrap pile. Sorry that the pictures look a little cluttered. That’s just the way my garage is! At least I can still get my truck inside.

I use a simple 2:1 pulley system for hoisting the boats, and I have a large cleat screwed into the wall for a tie‑off. I painted the inside of the kayak attic sky blue to keep wasps and spiders from building nests. (An old wive’s tale, perhaps, but it is working so far.) One picture is of the project in its early stages. Another is of one of my boats in the open uncompleted frame, then there’s one of a boat partway lifted into place, and then there’s a photo of the boat all the way up so you can see that it barely shows below ceiling level. The last photo is an end view looking up into the kayak attic which also shows a nifty way to store fishing poles where they are safe but still handy. It works great for paddles, too.

It’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention. If that’s true — and I think it is — then ingenuity is arguably the father, and the handiwork of both parents is evident in Stephen’s clever solution to his boat storage problem. So let’s take a closer look at how to build a kayak attic (it could work for bikes, too!)… Read more…

 
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