Bicycle Parking

What’s with all these bikes?

Things were coming to a crisis in the garage. With the addition of Ian’s new bike, we’d run out of space. His old bike was able to slide under the workbench, but the new one isn’t. So he was parking the bike, and there was double-parking galore. My Roubaix was being shifted from spot to spot and Tammy was terrified of accidentally hitting it when she parked.

Our old system dated back to when there were only three bikes, and one of them was a tiny kids’ bike. It worked well enough even when Miranda had moved up to the Kona bike. The two adult bikes hung on top, and the kids’ bike were underneath. We set the Ikea-hack hangers up when we moved to Calgary. Then Miranda grew. And I ended up with two bikes (one for commuting and a road bike). Then I got a second road bike. Then Tammy got her new hybrid. And finally Ian graduated to a larger bike.

The old system broke down. I also had a couple of long-standing grudges about the garage: the shelves with my most-often accessed tools were not easy to get at, especially in the winter, and the floor was crudded out with the detritus of four years’ dirt, leaves and miscellaneous et cetera.

We cleared out the garage (everybody helped). I swept and hosed out the garage and then  Tammy and I put up new bike hangers.

And Tammy asked me why there were three more spots for hanging bikes. 🙄 No reason. Just got carried away, was all…

Then we put everything back, but moved a set of shelves to be by the door, so that the tools could be reached easily.

Unfortunately, this is the good part of today’s story. The bad part is that the Golf is currently sitting at Northland VW. Last night, Tammy had to wait an hour and a half for her car to start after work, so we took it to the dealer this morning. The amazing part was that the car demonstrated its “won’t start” behaviour with the service guy and the shop foreman. That never happens! Honest, it doesn’t start sometimes, believe me!

They have diagnostic’ed everything and have narrowed it down to replacing the console, which includes the ignition inhibitor. It’ll be $1000 to fix (parts and labour) and it doesn’t guarantee anything, but there’s no other obvious culprit.