How we built an indoor rock climbing wall, step by step

In this post I’m going to share step by step how we made a rock climbing wall in our home, so our kids won’t climb the other walls! (see what I did there?)

It’s winter here in my neck of the woods, and everyone is a little feral. Given that there’s 8 people in my home, and my home was not made for 8 people, we needed something. An energy burner. But it couldn’t take up floor space. Because 8 people.

A rock wall! This. This is the answer.

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For this project I used:

3/4″ plywood 4×8′ sheet

Rock climbing holds

Stud finder

1/2″ plywood 2×2′, cut to 2×24″ strips

Spax lag screws 3.5″

First things first, find the studs in the wall. I like to apply a small piece of blue painter’s tape when I hit one.

Next up, I removed my daughter’s hair bow collection from the wall.

Given that we have 8′ ceilings, I measured how much I needed to remove from the plywood. I wanted this rock wall to be about 12″ off the floor, and 6″ from the ceiling.

I cut 18″ from the plywood to shorten it a little bit. Then, using a t-square, I marked out where the studs would hit on the plywood. The goal was to keep the climbing holds off that line, so that the lag screws could go anywhere along the studs.

I also did this because we used the bolts that came with the climbing holds. However, those bolts were long and we hoped to put this flush with the wall. To remedy the length of the bolts and the plywood depth, we added 1/2″ plywood strips, 2×24″ along the back side, centered where the studs were. On the front side we added washers to the bolts when they were attached. This gave us enough leeway to keep the climbing wall mostly flush.

I then flipped the plywood over and laid out the climbing holds, trying to mix the colors and keep the design random.

Using a 3/8″ drill bit, I drilled holes where the holds were, using the holds as a guide.

I set the plywood upright and started attaching the holds, following the picture I had taken after laying them out at random.

After attaching all the holds, my husband positioned and secured the plywood to the wall using 3.5″ lag screws. We were generous in our lag screw application.