Home bouldering wall question

I am contemplating building a home bouldering wall in my basement. Space and ceiling height are limited. I have read a few articles/posts on this and it seems like it "could" work. I am trying to decide if it is worth it.

Basically, what I will be able to do is have a 45 degree wall with a 10 inch kick plate. It can be 8ft wide and give me 8ft of climbing height from the top of the kick plate. Do you think an indoor wall that size would be worth it to build and provide value? Assuming I could put enough t-nuts on it and have enough holds to vary it up and move around with frequency?

My other option is to build something outside which has its own drawbacks. Feedback appreciated.

Thanks.

You can certainly get strong on something like that. But I think it's all about personal preference. I built a 12'x8' wall and used it for about 6 months. Now I haven't used it in over 2 years. Not because it wasn't effective, but because I got bored / lost training motivation.

Basically, building a wall is great if you are motivated to train on a woodie.

My wall is 8'x8' w/ 12" kickboard and I find it only the slightest bit more interesting than hangboarding because of the lack of variation after a few months. There is just only so many ways to set a wall that small and the boredom factor grows exponentially as your training focus shifts from pure strength to endurance.

If its "worth it" depends on you. Its a lot of repetition and a lot of short laps. Some people can throw on some music and bang that out no problem, some can't.

I'd recommend climbing on a wall that has a similar angle and size as the one you have in mind. My buddy and I built a woodie in my living room and we originally had the angle at around 30 or 35 degrees. To fit in the living room we adjusted it a bit but even at ~25 degrees it's still pretty tough to climb on. The size of our wall is the same dimension as the one you're building and I find it to be as a useful training tool. But I usually do a couple of laps (3m on/3m off) on the wall then do a hangboarding session.

Getting the right holds for something that steep is tough as well (it can get expensive). If you're just hoping to do short boulder problems on it then you can put some more heinous holds on there, but with our wall we had to find some pretty large positive holds in order to not get pumped out really quickly. I'd really only recommend a woodie if there is no gym nearby. Even though you'll save some money in the long run, a gym, to me, is more fun then a woodie.

Sounds like the size I had in my bedroom, except I extended it across the ceiling, gaining a full overhang. It was up for a couple of years and my grand-kids loved it also. What ever you put up can be taken down. The cost of the wall is cheap, but depending on what holds you want, that is where the money goes ...

Thank you for the input everyone. I'll need to weigh out a few things and decide. Outdoors may give me more flexibility. Hopefully I'll use it. My main goal is to get a good activity specific workout without having to go somewhere and impact the family. I guess the motivation is similar for anyone considering it.

on my 8'x 8' (similar angle) i have 6 volumes that I change around quite often to change things up a bit. I would recommend using a couple

That's plenty big enough to be of use. It worked for Malcolm Smith, using a smaller board!

youtube.com/watch?v=vCFLB0l…

From my own experience, and as others have said, if you have a semi-decent bouldering wall near where you live, a woodie rarely gets used. I built mine to train for a 54-move endurance sport route, and it finally got me up it. 10x10', no kick-board, and 17° ... with as many holds as I could fit!

With a wall that size, you're probably better off setting up a system wall. They're not as fun and just bouldering but if you're disciplined, you'll get better results.