How to Turn Your Backyard or Garage into Your Dream Dojo

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Of the many things that came from the COVID-19 pandemic, one was an explosion in backyard/ home walls. With the rock gyms closed, restrictions on travel and outdoor climbing, and pent-up pandemic angst, climbers began throwing up woodies—wooden home boards—left and right. Facebook’s Home Climbing Wall Forum exploded with photos of new walls and folks looking for tips on hold selection, setting, and training. And a YouTube channel, Home Climbing Wall TV, popped up. It was also a good time to be an entrepreneur; you could cut basic crimps and pinches from Home Depot lumber, sand them, and make a killing selling them to desperate climbers.

What this all showed was just what a great climbing adventure you can have in your backyard, garage, or house. With a little space, some planning, and a relatively modest cash outlay, you can create training tools just as effective—and often even more so—than at your local gym. These steep home walls, with their scatterings of holds and unlimited possible sequences, can turn even the slowest enduro-sloth into a crux-crushing machine.

The key with a home wall is being self-motivated: It takes work to build, reset, and maintain these walls. And for those for whom the gym is an important social outlet, training at home can feel lonely unless you create a community of training friends. Which is why you want to build the sickest setup possible—so that your crew can’t stay away.

Here, to inspire you on your own backyard adventure, we’ve outlined three different levels of home setup, ranging from a budget-friendly front-yard woodie, to a custom-built backyard MoonBoard, to a modular frame + MoonBoard and circuit walls in a garage.

Gene Overcash: 14’ x 12’ woodie in a front yard, Salisbury, North Carolina

Angle: 30°

Materials: 2x4s and 2x6s for framing, with cemented-in 4×4 support posts; 4’x8’ ¾” plywood with the T-nuts installed in a grid, 6 inches apart

Holds: Secondhand holds from local gyms, homemade holds cast from molds, Atomik holds

Padding: One trifold and two regular Mad Rock crashpads

Cost: ~$2,000. Used climbing wall (with T-nuts and holds): $1,000; additional construction materials (to finish framing, add support posts, paint, etc.): $200; new climbing holds: $550; padding (used crashpads from Facebook Marketplace): $200

Other training accouterments: Indoor training area includes hangboard, pullup bar, kettlebells, and various dumbbells

Setting + Skills Tips:

• “Take your time—have a plan and climb while setting to make sure your planned-out hold arrangement makes sense.”
• “Place precarious (oddly angled) feet randomly, using those feet often in different circuits until they feel comfortable.”
• “Use your wall to work on memorization. Through imagining and then setting moves and lines, you’re forced to remember what you’re doing as you climb, keeping track of handholds when they become feet.”

Gene Overcash is a busy guy, with a new roofing and restoration business and three kids at home, a full life he works to balance with his passion for climbing. He loves where he lives in Salisbury, North Carolina, in the state’s Piedmont region, with its easy access to Southeast sandstone, gneiss, quartzite, and granite. But for staying fit during the week, it was an hour drive to the closest gyms, which meant at least a four-hour commitment (the roundtrip drive plus gym time).

“That was four hours gone, two days a week,” he says. “When I started my new business, I could no longer justify the time-suck.”

Overcash started looking around on the web, and in August 2023 found a guy in Greenville, South Carolina, selling his 14’ x 12’ backyard wall with a 2’ kicker panel—framing, panels, T-nuts, and 140 holds (including foot chips and four homemade volumes) included—for only $1,000. So Overcash drove down, loaded the disassembled wall on his trailer, and brought it home, setting it up in his front yard. There, he added framing, cemented 4×4 support posts into the soil, slapped some primer plus exterior paint on the wall to weatherize it against NC’s epic rain and humidity (he also drapes a tarp over the back to protect the hardware), and found used crashpads on Facebook Marketplace. He has since continued adding new holds to the wall.

“Now I only need to walk 50 yards into my front yard instead of driving an hour,” Overcash says.

Overcash has the wall tilted at 30° and resets it quarterly. (“Volunteers are hard to come by when it comes to bolting holds on the wall,” he jokes.) Right now, the wall is set up for him to—in addition to the standard spray-wall bouldering—practice lockoffs and ladder moves, though in the past he had a dedicated campus section. In essence, he tailors the setting to his current training and project goals. Overcash uses his wall two to three times a week, so he’s fit and ready for weekend outings or the occasional weekday climbing with his wife. He said he’s also stoked when his kids come out and climb with him.

An aficionado of all the rock disciplines—sport, trad, and bouldering—Overcash uses the board to hone everything from limit bouldering, to power-endurance training with circuits and 4x4s, to practicing anchor-building and clipping draws from strenuous stances using pre-installed hangers. He also builds crux simulators for outdoor projects, imprinting the movement. “I love how barebones and traditional training on a spray wall of your own creation is,” he muses. “So much of our culture is fixated on training in a commercial gym setting. When I mention to other climbers that my training consists of a simple spray wall in my yard mixed in with getting on rock, it makes me feel a bit rebellious!”

Ted Lanzano: 8’ x 12’ MoonBoard (2019 Set at 40°) in a backyard, Boulder, Colorado 

Angle: 40°

Materials: 2x4s and 2x6s for framing, with cemented-in 4×4 support posts; 4’x8’ ¾” marine-grade plywood with the T-nuts installed in the MoonBoard grid, 20 centimeters apart

Holds: 2019 MoonBoard set plus some jugs swapped in and on the sides for kids and warming up

Padding: Rubber Flooring gymnastic crash mat plus two tumbling mats down by the kicker panel

Cost: ~$7,700. Wall materials and construction: $3,600; MoonBoard 2019 holds (School Holds sets A + B, Wood Holds sets A + B + C): $2,652.51 at current exchange rate; other holds: $300; bolts and screws: $150–200; pads: $700; tools: $200; other (rock base, stain, stickers for numbers and letters on the MoonBoard grid, etc.): $150

Other training accouterments: Four hangboards throughout the house: OG Metolius from 1997, Tension Simple hangboard with smaller edges (6–10mm), Tension Grindstone hangboard with larger edges (8–50 mm), Trango Rock Prodigy hangboard with hanging globes from Three Ball Climbing; weight pin; dumbbells

Setting + Skills Tips:

• “With a MoonBoard, add holds on the sides and in the middle—maybe swapped out for MoonBoard holds you don’t use much—for warming up, circuits, and endurance training. I got some nice screw-on jugs with a small profile from Atomik.”
• “For going to crags with no warmups, you can warm up on your backyard wall, plus it’s free of the usual gym annoyances (music, loud people, boulder problems with no connection to outdoor climbing, people excessively stretching, etc.).”
• “Don’t skimp on padding: My back was happy when I ditched my old climbing crashpads and invested in a proper gymnastics pad and tumbling pads. Plus, the new pads are easier to store—I just rotate them and then use eyebolts and two lengths of old rope to store them against the wall, off the ground and away from snow and rain.”

Ted Lanzano is a Boulder, Colorado, native who, with his brother Stan, has been climbing on the local granite and sandstone since his teenage years. After the arrival of his two children, and with a full-time job at the Environmental Protection Agency, Ted found himself pressed for time, and didn’t want to deal with peak, after-work hours at the local gyms. In April 2020—the height of the pandemic—he, like so many other climbers, put a wall in his backyard. In this case, Lanzano is a diehard MoonBoarder, so it was a regulation MoonBoard.

Lanzanzo hired a climber/contractor to build it, but unfortunately the climber failed to scrutinize the MoonBoard blueprints, and built the wall without row 18—the crucial finishing row. “I didn’t realize this until the wall was fully built,” says Lanzano. “When I asked the contractor, he said it was fine and I could just add some holds to the [lip of the board], which is entirely unacceptable for a MoonBoard.” The contractor then left town, leaving Lanzano to sort it out. So Lananzo hired a friend, another contractor/climber, to finish the job correctly. After that, there were other details—everything from staining the wood panels to protect the outdoor wall, to adding a corrugated sheet-metal “roof” to the back to protect the T-nuts, to finding the right bolts and screws for the holds, to figuring out the padding and pad storage.

Boulder has long, snowy winters and hot, monsoonal summers, so Lanzano’s outdoor board is best in the milder spring and autumn, though it does face north, making it good for mornings on warmer days, and it’s usable on clear winter days if you’re cold tolerant. Lanzano didn’t put in LED lights, worried about the elements’ effect on the electronics, though other climbers with outdoor boards have clad the back of the wall in plastic sheeting to protect their LED kit. Not having lights has made Lanzano good at memorizing beta.

“With a backyard wall, I can easily sneak out for a session with no impact on work or kids,” says Lanzano, who uses the wall once or twice a week. He has been using the MoonBoard and the four hangboards plus weights inside his home as part of a Lattice training program, looking to ramp up limit power, strength-endurance, and power-endurance for a 5.14 project in his backyard of the Flatirons. One of Lanzano’s favorite, and gnarliest, power-endurance drills is to go up a MoonBoard problem, downclimb the added-on jugs, and then go straight into another MoonBoard problem. He also does limit problems and 4x4s, as well as sets crux simulators, and gets his kids out on the wall when he can.

“Even though there are five really nice commercial climbing gyms within a 15-minute drive from my house, sometimes after work I just can’t get the energy to make the trip, but I can totally walk 30 feet to my home wall,” Lanzano says. “Plus having the endless problems and opportunity to set on the MoonBoard keeps it fresh.”

Matt Samet: 8’ x 12’ Grasshopper Adjustable Master Wall + MoonBoard (2024 Set at 40°) + Circuit Walls in a garage, Gunbarrel, Colorado

Angles: 40° (Grasshopper Wall) + 10°, 20°, and a short panel at 90° (circuit walls)

Materials: For the circuit walls—2x4s and 2x6s for framing; 4’x8’ ¾” plywood with the T-nuts installed in a grid, 10” apart

Holds: 2024 MoonBoard set; secondhand holds from the Boulder Rock Club; Atomik pyramid volumes, crimps, and oval crimps; Kilter pockets; Rock Candy holds; Metolius Basalt Climbing Holds; various wooden holds

Padding: Seven twin-size futons plus multiple crashpads, layered

Cost: ~$24,700. Grasshopper Climbing 8’ x 12’  Adjustable Master Wall: $14,000; labor for frame installation and materials for garage customization: $1,500; MoonBoard 2024 holds + lights (School Holds sets D + E + F, Wood Holds sets A + B + C, LED kit): $3,750 at current exchange rate; materials and labor for circuit walls: $1,800; other holds: $1,000 ($400 for secondhand gym holds plus impact driver, $400 for 9 volumes + crimps and oval crimps from Atomik, $200 in wood holds, other holds were donated or used for testing); padding (six futons purchased in 2012 + one free futon + donated crashpads): $650; heating (Cadet the Hot One Heater + 240V outlet): $420; cooling (LG 6,000 BTU portable AC unit + box fan): $370; ladder (Gorilla Ladders 4.5’ Step Ladder): $80; wrenches and tools: $100

Other training accouterments: Metolius Climbing Prime Rib and Wood Grips II Compact hangboards; wall-mounted pullup bar; Snode adjustable dumbbells and weight bench

Setting + Skills Tips:

• “If friends are using your wall, leave a big brush lying below it—they’ll get the hint and brush during each session. Also, if anyone wants to donate holds or padding, let them; you can never have too much of either.”
• “For an enclosed space like a garage, use a leafblower to blast out the chalk after each session, including from the back of the wall.”
• “If setting circuits, include ‘hard points’—finishing jugs or match holds where one circuit ends and another begins. This lets you climb ‘infinity loops,’ doing as many moves as you want in a row to train endurance.”

When my wife and I moved into our home in 2012, we only had one kid (now we have three—and eight pets). One of the first things I did was build a wall in the back of our two-car garage, as I knew that my time to get to the gym, even if it’s just 10 minutes away, would often be limited. I’m glad for my prescience, since I use my garage wall at least once a week, whether it’s to warm up before climbing, for a quick, post-climbing workout, or for a full multi-hour training session. Lots of other folks have used the garage over the years too, and we jokingly call it the Gunbarrel Rock Club, for the neighborhood we live in. It’s steep, it’s convenient, it’s 30 steps from my home office, and I can climb whenever I want without enduring the soul-sucking torments of “rock-gym social hour.”

While on its face this garage gym might seem expensive, its current iteration reflects an evolution over the past dozen years, with the money spent in fits and spurts. The wall in its original form was an igloo/amphitheater, with a 45° board on the left, a 10° wall in the back, and a small roof and 20° wall on the right, with a long, 90° roof tying the walls together. I hired a climber and carpenter, Nick Smith, to build the wall, and worked alongside him for five days, helping put in T-nuts, screw down panels, and run to Home Depot for lumber. I got a boatload of retired holds from the Boulder Rock Club (BRC) for only $400, including macros that surely cost hundreds of dollars each when new. I mostly used this setup for circuits and power-endurance training, with some limit bouldering throw in.

In 2019, I got into MoonBoarding and realized I probably had room for one in my garage—if we punched through the eight-foot ceiling into a storage attic. Working full-time at Climbing Magazine, I was able to wrangle a deal with Grasshopper Climbing and MoonClimbing to have this be the magazine’s wall, for staff to use. A couple other climbers helped me tear out the 45° wall in exchange for my surplus holds, then I hired a carpenter friend to help us punch through the ceiling and frame a “box” for the Grasshopper Adjustable Master Wall to stick up into; he also helped install the frame, winch, and anchor points. That was five years ago, and I’ve since had up four MoonBoard sets: 2016, 2017, 2019, and now 2024. I’ve also kept upgrading the circuit walls, with volumes and crimps from Atomik, as well as holds donated by friends or that I was testing, keeping only the coolest shapes from my original batch from the BRC.

These days, I mostly use the MoonBoard. However, I kept the 10° and 20° circuit walls and a small panel of linking roof and will do circuits as well, with routes from 20 to 40 moves long, varying from easy to hard and for the most part on crimps, the main holds on our local sandstone and granite. You can also link the circuits into the MoonBoard by transferring/stemming over onto its lower right side from the 10° circuit wall; this is always hard AF—getting up the body-tension-dependent board at any grade, while pumped, is an ass-kicker.

To make the garage comfy, I’ve added bells and whistles: a stepladder for hold installation, brushing, and maintenance; a bluetooth stereo; LED lights around the board for atmosphere and visibility; a 240V high-powered garage heater; a portable AC unit and box fan for warmer days; a thermometer/humidity meter to gauge conditions; and a small rocking chair and stool to sit on between burns. I also put drywall around the “box” the board sticks up into and insulated the framing. And there are two hangboards facing the MoonBoard inside the “box,” with the drywall above covered in glow-in-the-dark celestial and unicorn stickers my kids put there—because of course they did.

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