Kids bouncing off the walls (literally) and climbing the furniture due to too much time inside during the COVID-19 pandemic? Solution: build your own home climbing wall! Apparently I'm a little late to the party and this became all the rage pretty early in the pandemic. I built one* for our daughter for Christmas, and this Instructable will walk you through all the steps to build a simple kids' climbing wall on a straight, vertical indoor wall. There are some more complicated tutorials out there for building on angled walls, like this one. You'll find this one helpful if, like me, you are relatively new to climbing and have amateur-at-best woodworking capabilities. Let's get started!

*as with most things I wind up building for our kids, it was my wife's idea, along with the earlier under-the-stairs Elsa ice castle.

Supplies

Note: the quantity of materials you need will depend on how big you want your climbing wall to be. I'm listing exactly what I used to make a wall that's roughly 8 feet high x 8 feet wide - adjust as needed after you plan your wall (see step 1). I'm also assuming you are building on top of drywall with studs behind it - you will need different hardware for anchoring to masonry etc. Important: read the note below about climbing holds and T-nuts.

Materials:

3/4" x 4' x 8' ACX plywood sheets (2, ACX = "nice on one side")
2"x4"x8' studs (7)
3" screws (50ish, for attaching 2x4's to existing studs behind drywall)
2" screws (50ish, for attaching plywood to 2x4's)
M10 T-nuts (approx. 150, note that climbing holds may come with these, but you will still need extra)
climbing holds (50) - two packs of these from Zuly and one of these from Slothside
M10x18 bolts (50, came with the climbing holds)
Paint (optional)
Crash pad or gymnastics mat

Tools:

Circular saw and/or miter saw (only required if you need to shorten the lumber - my ceiling is less than 8')
Drill
Assorted drill bits, including spade bit for T-nut holes
Hammer or mallet
Stud finder
Tape measure
Chalk line or long straightedge
Level
Sandpaper

Note about climbing holds

Be careful when searching for climbing holds if you are buying on Amazon. Most of what comes up in search is the kind you'll find on a kid's playground like these. They use two bolts to attach and are generally much cheaper ($1-2 each). The "real" climbing holds like you would find at a climbing gym come in a bigger variety of shapes and are generally much more expensive - I found $6-10 each. They attach with a single bolt and (usually) have an extra screw that prevents them from spinning. I had to search around on Amazon for a while to find them. The ones I bought are linked above - but be careful, they are from a UK seller and use metric (M10) bolts. You can buy directly from a company like Atomik or Metolius, and searching around it looks like you can also order them at outdoor stores like REI - from what I've seen they generally use 3/8" bolts. Point being, be careful not to mix and match metric and English bolts/T-nuts because while they look about the same size, they will not be compatible with each other. Pick one system and stick with it.

The ones I wound up purchasing from Zuly and Slothside are nice but they are definitely kid-sized. They are great for my five year old, but if you have teenagers or adults who will be using the wall and are also new to climbing, you will probably want bigger grips. Search for "jugs," which are the ones that are really easy to grab.

Step 1: Identify and Prepare a Location

First step - where are you going to put the wall and how big do you want it to be? Ideally you want a large, flat space on an existing wall that is free from obstructions both on the wall and in front of it - you don't want anyone falling off and hitting their head on a coffee table. It's easiest to make your wall a multiple of 4 feet wide since you'll be using whole sheets of plywood, but you can rip the plywood to a narrower width if needed You can make cut-outs in your wall for home features that you need to retain access to (light switches, heating vents, outlets, etc.) if necessary. I was lazy and just covered up a couple outlets because we have plenty in that room.

Once you've picked a spot, use a stud finder to mark all the stud locations. They are usually 16" center-to-center, but it can vary so it's always good to check. You may also need to remove molding at the base of the wall so it isn't in the way later. I did this with a combination of a chisel and a Dremel because I had to cut the molding. That was a bit of a pain and I assume there's a much better tool to do that.

Step 2: Plan Your Wall

Ok, you've picked a location, you know how big you want your wall to be, and you know where the studs are. Time to make a drawing and figure out exactly how much lumber you'll need. You can do this by hand or in a CAD program, but I find it pretty convenient to just do a rough layout in Powerpoint because you can set a 1/12" grid spacing and have everything snap easily. I tried to attach my .pptx file but apparently that isn't a supported file type - come on Instructables, haven't you ever seen someone use Powerpoint as a CAD program before?

You want the plywood to be well-supported and not wobbly at the edges, so ideally you'll lay things out such that the plywood lines up with studs. Again, if needed you can rip the plywood to a different width. In theory you could attach a 2x4 using drywall anchors if it doesn't line up with a stud, but I wouldn't trust that very much.

As for what you'll actually be building, take a look at the top-view cross section. You'll be screwing 2x4's into the existing studs, and then screwing the sheets of plywood into those. Before you attach the plywood, however, you'll drill a grid of holes and hammer in T-nuts from the back of the plywood. This gives you a flexible grid of holes if you want to add more climbing holds in the future or rearrange the ones you have.

That means you'll need to decide in advance what you want your grid layout to look like. Atomik has a bunch of helpful templates here. The more holes you drill, the more T-nuts you need (and the higher the cost), but the more flexibility you'll have in terms of moving holds around. I went with the 72-nut pattern.

Note that there's a tradeoff with my build - slapping 2x4's flat onto the existing wall is easy and sturdy. BUT their width means that, if you want to follow a regular hole pattern, some of the holes may wind up being blocked by a 2x4 from behind (which becomes a problem because the bolts are long enough that they poke out the back of the plywood). You could get around this by more carefully planning where to put the holes so you avoid the 2x4's, possibly by using 2x3's instead, or maybe by using shorter bolts so they don't poke all the way through the back of the plywood - but for strength purposes I'm assuming the latter is not recommended (otherwise they wouldn't give you the longer bolts to begin with).

Step 3: Attach the 2x4s

If needed, cut the 2x4's to length. My basement has a drop ceiling so it's a little less than 8 feet. Pre-drill holes into the 2x4's and into the existing studs, then use the 3" screws to attach the new 2x4's to the studs. I put a screw roughly every 2 feet. Use a level to make sure they're vertical before you screw them in all the way.

Step 4: Drill Holes in the Plywood

(I took a lot more pictures of this step for some reason, but it's a little more involved)

If needed, cut the plywood to length. Again my ceiling is less than 8 feet so I had to trim a bit off.
Mark the grid of holes on the back of the plywood. I used this as an excuse to buy a chalkline, but you can also just use a pencil and a long straightedge.
I wanted to avoid tear-out on the front of the board, so first I drilled small pilot holes through from the back of the plywood.
Then, flip the board over, and use the spade bit (diameter should match the outer diameter of your T-nuts, I think I used 1/2" even though I had metric T-nuts) to drill the large holes in from the front. This keeps the tear-out on the back of the board.
The holes were still a little rough on the front, and you don't want the kiddos to get any splinters when climbing - so I still went through and sanded/filed them all down individually to make sure they were smooth.

Step 5: Paint the Plywood (optional/Warning)

Looking around the internet, a lot of people choose to just keep these as bare wood. We wanted a painted look for our basement so chose a light gray (sort of rock-ish I guess?). The internet says to use floor paint for climbing walls because it's designed to be high-traffic and get scuffed up - especially important if your kids will be wearing climbing shoes. It's important to do this step before you put the T-nuts in, since you don't want the paint to gunk up the T-nut threads.

EDIT/WARNING: the floor paint is really sticky/grippy, which makes sense if you don't want people to slip on a floor. But I've found that makes it pretty difficult to move the climbing holds around when you want to rearrange things - they stick to the paint a little TOO well. Sometimes I have to pry them off and they wind up bringing some of the paint with them. If you know of a better type of paint for climbing walls, please leave a comment and I'll update this step!

Step 6: Hammer in the T-nuts

Flip the board over and hammer in the T-nuts from the back. Since I didn't want to scratch the front of the now-painted board, I did this on a blanket. Note that one set of climbing holds I bought came with "brad hole nuts" instead of T-nuts, so I used a few of those. They have a similar function, but you screw them in from the back of the board instead of hammering them in.

Step 7: Screw the Plywood to the 2x4s

Get help moving the plywood if you can - that stuff is heavy! Make sure it's level and the edges line up, then screw the plywood to the 2x4's with the 2" screws. I placed a screw roughly every foot.

Important: pre-drill and countersink holes for the screws, and make sure they are flush with the surface of the wood. You definitely don't want the kiddos to get snagged on one when climbing. You may want to do another pass with sandpaper to make sure there aren't any burs or splinters poking out after all that drilling (which is kind of difficult if you've already painted - but I wanted to do the painting in my garage and not my basement).

Step 8: Attach the Climbing Holds

Screw the climbing holds into the T-nuts with the M10 (or 3/8" depending on what you bought) bolts and an Allen wrench. Depending on how many holds you bought, you can try to color-code the routes like you would find at a real climbing gym. You can also try to plan out reasonable spacing based on your kids' height and skill level. I wanted this to be a Christmas-morning surprise so I gave it my best shot, and then we had to make a few adjustments once my daughter tried it out - which is the nice thing about that pre-drilled grid of T-nuts. Initially we only had 30 holds, which I found wasn't quite enough for the 8'x8' wall, so we ordered another set of 20, and that seems sufficient.

Many of the holds come with an extra stabilizing screw to prevent them from rotating. I didn't want to poke a bunch of holes in the plywood right away in case we wound up adjusting the routes, but so far I've found that there's enough friction and my 5-year old daughter isn't heavy enough to make the holds rotate anyway, so I'm holding off on using those.

Step 9: Enjoy!

It's time to start climbing! Again, I would let your kids try it out and you can adjust the holds if anything is too hard or too easy. Also, don't forget that you will want a crash pad or gymnastics mat on the flood under the wall so you can avoid any hard landings.

So far my daughter loves the wall, and our 1 year old is already trying it (unsuccessfully) but he'll grow into it soon. It isn't really tall enough for an adult to do much since I can reach the top just standing on the ground, but if you can make one wide enough, I think you could get a decent side-to-side workout in.

Thanks for reading if you've made it this far! Have a question? Leave a comment!