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As I punctured the garage wall with my hammer, I realized how difficult it was to demolish drywall. I stuck my hand in the hole to grab hold of the drywall. I yanked on the drywall, losing my grip and nearly falling. Funny, demolishing a wall shouldn’t be this hard, should it? I imagined that there were machines to do this.

At the same time, it dawned on me that the demolition goal was to insulate the garage walls so that I could drop loaded barbells without my neighbors calling the police.

Hopefully, the neighbors weren’t reaching for their phones as I swung my hammer through another part of the wall.

Anyways, I built a gym.

I finished it last November over Thanksgiving break. It took nearly two years to build.

The platform is 7'36" x 10'. I started with 8' x 10'. But, at 8 feet long, the platform ends about four inches into the space in front of the doorway to the house. The black underlayment in the picture above is where the platform finished initially. But, at eight feet, there’s enough of a step that a kiddo or wifey could easily roll their ankle when they stepped in the garage. So I cut it down.

The platform is made of four layers. The bottom layer is black rubber underlayment about a quarter of an inch thick. Initially, I thought the underlayment would help with sound dampening. But actually, it provides a slightly more even surface to lay down the platform.

On top of the underlayment is a wedge.

The wedge is made of layered 2.7mm plywood. It’s designed to level the sloped floor in my garage.

The wedge idea was taken from this youtube video.

On top of the wedge is a layer of 19/32 inch OSB board.

Yes, 19/32 inches.

Not 1/2 inch. Not 3/4 inch. But, 19/32 inch.

Why is 19/32 a standard measurement for OSB board? I have no idea but it was light enough to load by myself after being nearly pinned by a 3/4" maple plywood.

In either case, the OSB is what I screw the top layer onto. It also provides a bit more stability when I’m dropping weights on the platform.

As mentioned, on top of the OSB is a 3/4" maple plywood. On both sides of the platform is 3/4" rubber flooring from rubberflooringinc.com.

The rest of the equipment is as follows:

Rogue RML-3W Fold Back Wall Mount Rack
Rogue Burgener & Rippetoe Bar
Rogue KG training plates v1.0 (check out the 2.0 plates)
Rogue KG change plates
Rogue Fold Up Utility Bench
Rogue Vertical Plate Tree 2.0

I’m a big Rogue fan. My old gym had a lot of rogue gear that held up to any torture CrossFitters could throw. I also love that most of their products are made in the USA.

The wall-mounted rack enables using the full size of the platform for olympic weightliftng. Well, it would if I had mounted the rack high enough.

If you look at the bottom of the wall where the rack is mounted, there’s a concrete ledge. The ledge comes off the wall about three inches.

When I measured how high to mount the rack on the wall, I tried to add enough height so that when I folded the rack back into the wall, the feet of the rack would sit on top of the concrete wall.

Unfortunately, I miscalculated.

So now the rack sits slightly angled away from the wall when I fold it back.

I bought concrete chisels to carve space for the racks, but I still need to get around to chipping away.

One last thing I’ll mention about the rack is that it should be installed with two people. Those black slingers are heavy.

The Vertical Plate Tree was not in the original plan when I was building out the gym. I originally wanted a wooden bench where I could store the weights underneath like in the bottom right of this Catalyst Athletics video. But the desire to finish and start working out was stronger than buying wood to build the platform.

That said, I’ve been working out for nearly three weeks and I love it.

Oh, and the demolition of the garage walls? I hired a guy.

So you know how pathetic it was for me, I spent an hour knocking out a 2’x4' hole in the wall.

In the same time, the guy demo’d half the walls in my garage by himself. His friend showed up shortly afterward, and finished the other half of the garage. In total, they worked three hours.

I paid the gentlemen and walked into the house slightly shorter than normal.