The worst roommate I ever had was a 50-pound ebike I was testing for a couple of weeks. At the time, I was living on the third floor of a walk-up apartment building in Ridgewood, New York City, and wrestling it up a flight of twisting, turning stairs every day wasn’t the end of my bike-related troubles.

Once I got the porky little beast up onto the third-floor landing, I had to snuggle it into the living room of an apartment I shared with two other people, sometimes three. These people I liked, but I knew I was testing their patience by letting the bike take up such a significant chunk of the floor space.

Since then, I’ve learned there are better ways to store a bike at home, even if you’re short on real estate, don’t have a garage, and can’t lock up your bike outside and reasonably expect it to still be there in the morning.

It’s about the walls

Every time I look at a blank wall, I see unrealized storage space. Living in a city drove that lesson firmly into my brain. That’s doubly true for bicycles. After I’d moved out of my previous apartment, I found myself in another apartment down the road with another bike.

This one I parked in what I call a hallway, even if it’s about the length of a Labrador Retriever and not much broader. Parked with its wheels on the ground, it was in my way constantly all day long, and I kept walking into it, over and over.

After a few dozen indoor bike-pedestrian accidents, in which I was both the pedestrian and aggressor, I quit procrastinating and began shopping for a bike hook. How would I orient it, though? Some racks held bikes horizontally but off the ground, and hooks that held them by the front wheel vertically up in the air.

The former leaves room for wall shelves above, and they don’t interfere with any pictures you already have hanging on your walls. Meanwhile they get the bikes’ wheels off your floor. That had two unexpected, positive consequences for me.

One, it was way easier to vacuum and mop my floors without having to thread the vacuum around a bike’s tires, and two, I stopped stubbing toes on the kickstand. It didn’t reduce the need to squeeze past the bike, though.

So I tried a vertical wall mount. You could use a regular wall hook, but the Feedback Sports Velo Hinge 2.0 looked like a more attractive option to me. It was burly and mounted to the wall with three bolts.

I dug how it’d swing, allowing me to lift the bike up to slip the front wheel over the hook, and then swing it flush against the wall. Or as flush as I could expect, given the pedal and handlebars that prevented the bike’s front from resting totally flat against the wall.

But it was a major improvement. When I was sliding past my bike in the hallway, I wasn’t constantly feeling like somebody arriving late to a movie theater and trying to squeeze past a bunch of seated patrons.

For those of you mounting ebikes, make sure your ride doesn’t exceed the maximum weight rating of the bike hook. Mount it to wall studs with wood screws if you can. If you have metal studs or can’t find a stud near where you’d like to mount it, use toggle bolts, but be careful not to overload them or they’ll pull out of the wall.

If you have an 80-pound ebike, though, would you even want to chance it? Whether the mount could hold it or not, that’d get exhausting quickly, anyhow.