No-Fail Ladder Storage Rack

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Having ladders around the household is really key, whether it's a two-step step ladder, a four-footer, a six-footer, even an eight-footer, extension ladders, or just those handy helper ladders. Whatever it is you need, you need to be able to reach those areas in your home you need to service. Well, as you can see, we have an extension ladder here, and that is because we have very tall sidewalls on our home. But stowing the thing, which is 52 pounds and pretty sizable, this is a 20-foot Werner, well, it takes a little bit of ingenuity. When we were able to make this rack, I'm going to tell you all about it. Stay tuned. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here. We love having the right tools around here, including this 20-foot extension ladder, but we needed a place to stow it. We were remodeling our barn here, put a slab in the floor here, getting it really organized, including a place to pull in our tractor, and the ladder, as useful as it is, is in the way. And you don't stow ladders outside. It's really hard on the rigging if it is an extension ladder, and especially if it's a fiberglass type, which is a non-conducting type for working around electrical cables and that sort of thing. The sun is really hard on it, so you've got to keep it safely stowed. Well, we went ahead and utilized the ceiling space here in our tractor barn to stow this 20-footer, and we did it by putting a couple of suspended loops or ladder rungs, if you want to call that, below the bottom cords of the trusses here in the barn. And all of the trusses in this barn, we doubled them up when we're building up, so we had double strength across, and we'd be able to do these kind of things. Well, checking the spec sheet for the Werner ladder, it's right at 52 pounds. It's not super heavy, but it's heavy enough that it takes a little ingenuity to put it up in the barn here. And so let's walk you through this bit by bit. Let's start with the materials list. Now, you can build these out of different things, and you might be able to get some salvage material instead of brand new. I bought this at our local Home Depot. It was fairly pricey because the floor flanges themselves are about eight bucks a piece, and then you start adding up the pieces, and it can get pretty pricey. I was able to use one recycled piece of pipe here. I mean, you might have more in your stockpile or might know somebody or a plumber that can provide these parts to you, and if so, way to go. And they don't have to be this size. You could go up larger, one inch, for instance. Half inch is probably okay. I preferred the heft of the three quarter, and as you can see here, these are galvanized, but they could be black iron as well. You can paint them. You can make them of other materials. However, whatever you're going to do, let's just start through building one of these using these types of materials. Here we go. So no matter how you source the materials to complete the project, this is what you're going to need on hand to make two down hangers off of the rafters. First thing you're going to need is four floor flanges. Try to say that fast several times, but here you go. There's one, two, three, and four. Then you're going to need four down pipes, and here, same thing. One, two for the first pair, and there are on the back for the second set. Also, you need elbows to connect the cross rods, and again, the magic number is four. Here's one, two, three, and four. And then, of course, you need the main cross bars. In this case, it's three quarter inch galvanized pipe, and these are 24 inch pipe nipples. There's a recycled one there. And then lastly, you need some pieces of one and a quarter inch PVC that are going to sleeve over these, and you can see it's installed in the back here, that are going to act as rollers. So we're going to make two sets of the hangers. Well, let's go ahead and assemble them, and I'll show you how this goes. We'll begin by inserting the pipe nipple into this sleeve here. Now notice that we don't need to put pipe dope or Teflon tape or anything on these threads simply because we're not running water through them, and they're certainly not going to be pressurized. This is only for mechanical or structural strength. So we'll just start with that. The next step we're going to do is screw on the two elbows. Because this isn't going to be structural, you don't have to really tighten these down. Pair of pliers will do just fine, or even in my case, by counter-twisting against each other, I was able to just use hand pressure. And what you're going to do is make sure that those are lined up with each other as you get ready to install the downrods. So let's go ahead and install the downrods. In this case, we use 10-inch pipe nipples. This gives about eight inches clear to clear from the top of this area where the thread ends all the way down to here. So I've got eight inches here, and that's more than enough for the extension ladder we're going to put in here. So let's go ahead and install the downrods. All right, now we've installed both of those downrods, but now is the time to double-check something. If you notice, looking under here, look at that is slightly up off the table, whereas on this side, it's laying tight, meaning that those are not aligned. So simply because I put these together with hand pressure here, it's really easy to adjust. So I'm going to just bend them down until that is right on the table. So now we know that we are perfectly aligned. Now it is time to install the floor flanges. Let's get to work on that. Now we have the completed pair that are ready to install. Now before we do that, what are other materials you can use? Well, you could certainly use metal tubing, both round and square or rectangular, with flanges that you could screw these to the underside of the joists or, in this case, underside of the trusses in our barn. Whatever you do, though, we recommend that you put some kind of roller on it like this, simply to make it easier to load the ladder and unload it when it comes time to stow it and then put it to use and then re-stow. You could also use certain conduits, metal conduits with the fittings, with set screws that would make it work. What we don't recommend, and somebody's going to ask, could you use PVC like this? Well, you might get it to work for a little bit, but we found that PVC does get brittle over time. It flexes, it cracks, and therefore it is not a good choice for just what is dead weight, very heavy ladder, hanging on it day in, day out, 24-7. I would not recommend it. So if you're going to make this investment and you're going to put this to work for you, don't cheap out. Get good materials and put it up there. Know that it's safe and secure and the ladder and you will be safe. All right, let's get to work. Let's go ahead and install this out in the barn and then see the finished results. All right, now that you've got these assembled, it's time to put them in place. So let's walk you through that. Well, the first thing you've got to do is lay out where they're going to go. In our barn, the center cord, there is a vertical brace that goes from the bottom cord right up to the roof line or the peak of the rafters or the trusses. So it's pretty easy to measure and we wanted to make sure that we got this out where it was easy enough to reach. So I took an arbitrary measurement of 24 inches and there was another reason. I wanted to move it away from the light so that the ladder didn't cast a harsh shadow when the lights were on over in the shelving that's on this side of the barn. So we went ahead and measured 24 inches and as you can see here, I marked the X and then I moved down further into the barn, marked another one and you can see those are in line with each other. Now the next thing you need to do is go ahead and temporarily mount these suspended holders up there and I did that with a pair of quick clamps just simply clamping on both sides and then went ahead and pre-drilled the holes just to make it easier to drive the screws and not have them wander on me when I was putting them in there. So I did that on both of them starting down at the further end there, worked on one side, got a couple of screws into it, moved to the other side, put a couple screws there. That allowed me to take the clamps off then I can finish up mounting the screws. I like using heavy duty screws with the square drives, it makes it a lot easier to drive especially overhead, does not take as much arm strength because the driver stays engaged and those screws if you'll notice have very heavy shanks so they're very strong and they're going to work hard for us the years to come while they hold this ladder safely up above. Now we move to the second end, got those put in and now as you can see they're both up and now it's time to put the ladder in. We started by lifting one end of the ladder, inserting it in the far holder down that area and you can see we have PVC pipe rollers on this just to help assist so there's less resistance when you load the ladder and we went ahead and loaded it in and then I put a block on the floor because I'm a little height challenged to help me get more leverage and so I didn't have to extend my arms up so high and I pushed the ladder back. Now here's something I found out right away, in this pole barn construction the trusses are four foot apart and when I went to slide this in before I could lift this into this one down here and then come forward the end of the ladder hit the next truss and wouldn't quite let me clear this and get it in here. At first I thought it was an epic fail but as it turned out all I need to do is pivot the ladder sideways a little bit to clear that, shoot it past a little bit then come back in at the right height and it went right home as you can see. Then I just centered it on both ends so that each one of these suspended rungs here is holding approximately the same weight. Well it's pretty simple, pretty straightforward, doesn't take a lot of intuitive or deep thinking but these are hard working and it's going to serve us well. Perhaps you've got something like this that you've used around your home or garden or storage space you'd like to share with your fellow viewers feel free to do so in the space below and if you found this concept and this construction to be helpful why don't you like the video and better yet why don't you like the channel that really helps us to continue to produce these kind of how-to idea and actually put your hands on it DIY videos for the home, the garden, the shop, the kitchen and great product reviews. Hey thanks for watching today until the next time this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com