How can I rig a windowbox on my fat balcony?

May 17, 2005 7:51 AM

I just planted flowers for the summertime, and I have two windowboxes that I want to hang off of my front balcony. The problem is that the balcony is 9" thick. All of the brackets I could find are 6" max. I can't drill holes as the balcony is old limestone and I'm afraid I'd ruin it.

My goal is to either (a) find a 9" bracket or (b) rig something clever up. Current candidates are just finding something to lenghten the 6" bracket or tying a rope to the bracket and then stringing the rope through something heavy on the floor of the balcony (a cinderblock or something) thus creating an eternally suspended windowbox.

These explanations aren't very englightening in print, I realize. But my faith in AskMe is strong. Has anyone ever dealt with this? What's my best solution?

posted by AgentRocket to Home & Garden (10 answers total)

Your rope idea will work, but use steel cable instead, for aesthetics. Or go the other direction and use a really hairy, hempy rope.

If you have to use brackets, you can make your own by buying a long metal (aluminum usually) strip (in Home Depot, I think in the aisle with screws and nails) and then cutting it to length, bending it (make clean angles by putting it in a vice or between two cinderblocks or bricks and bending by hand), and drilling holes in it. Then paint the bracket with a can of spray paint meant for metal.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:36 AM on May 17, 2005

Rather than tying the rope to a heavy weight if you've got the room you can just tye the two window boxes together and hang it over the railing like saddlebags on a horse.
posted by Mitheral at 9:02 AM on May 17, 2005

so you have a balcony outside your apartment that has a wall 9 inches thick? something like:

                                9"
inside                       ______
house             balcony   |      |
_______________|____________|      |
_floor_____________________________|

(i'm confused by the description)
posted by andrew cooke at 9:07 AM on May 17, 2005

tying together assumes that the boxes are strong enough to hold themselves together (if i understand the idea). i suspect that they aren't - that they need supporting from underneath using a metal bracket. when full of soil and water i bet they're really heavy. so i wouldn't have much faith in a bracket i had bent myself being strong enough to not unbend with the weight.

what you could perhaps do is use the 6" brackets to put a frame around the box, and then wrape the wire/rope round that.
posted by andrew cooke at 9:11 AM on May 17, 2005

First, consider safety of someone walking below the window box. If your design fails while you're underneath, you wouldn't want to catch it in the head -- so whatever you use has to be strong enough to support the box with a good safety margin.

I like the hairy hemp rope idea, partly because it's really strong and will withstand the elements well, and partly because it won't stretch much and therefore need adjusting.

If you go with the steel cable plan, use the proper ferrules for clamping the cable back onto itself. If you use the kind that close with a couple of bolts, then you can adjust the length easily while the (empty) box is in position for best fit.

Make darn sure that the "weighted" end of whatever you use is well secured -- if you use a cinderblock, you don't want someone to kick it away or whatever.

A better idea might be to embed a couple of eye bolts in the floor of the balcony. If it's concrete, then you can use the expanding anchor sleeves that a normal machine screw eye bolt will screw into. Drill holes in the floor, tap in the anchor sleeves, and screw in the eye bolts then attach the rope/cable to the bolts. Then you can kick them all you like.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 9:25 AM on May 17, 2005

#wire/rope########################
--------------+#***********     *#
  wall        |#*|             |*#
              |#*|             |*#
              |#*|             |*#
              |#*|     box     |*#
              |#*+-------------+*#
              |#*     ***********#
              |###################
              |

so the brackets (*****) help keep the box square. does that make sense?
posted by andrew cooke at 9:31 AM on May 17, 2005

Response by poster: andrew cooke -

your picture at 9:07 a.m. is right on. It's a balcony on the second floor of a three-flat in Chicago. There's a limestone wall around it that is 9" thick.

My goal was to do something like this:

AAAAABBB
A +wall+ B flowers B
A +wall+ BBBBBBBBB
A +wall+

where A is one part of the bracket (the extension/anchor part) and B is the window box holder

My "rope" idea was


..........AAAAAAB
.........A.+ wall + B flwrs B
....... A...+ wall + BBBBBBBB
......A.....+ wall +
CACC...+ wall +
ACCC...+ wall +
CCCC...+ wall +
+++++floor++

where C is something heavy, A is rope, and B is the window box holder. (the dots are placeholders because I don't know how to draw ASCII).

As goofy as all this drawing is, it is helping me. I like the saddlebags idea a lot. If I kept it weighted on both sides, I think that could work.

Keep your ingenuity coming, folks. Thanks for your help so far.
posted by AgentRocket at 10:52 AM on May 17, 2005

There should be some kind of web app where you can do rough sketching with your mouse, "save" the sketch, and the app gives you a URL you can use to put the image somewhere somewhere else. Like imageshack, but for drawings. Bonus: it has a toobar with common angles and shapes that you can stretch and move around.

All this ascii napkin stuff seems so 1980s.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 11:54 AM on May 17, 2005

but ASCII is so... quaint.
posted by Doohickie at 7:48 PM on May 17, 2005

Try searching for "iron works", or call an iron or steel bar supplier for recommendations. These shops can bend a heavy steel bar to make a larger bracket to fit over your wall. Some kind of counter weight or a hook bent on the inside sounds like a good idea, too.

For instance, I used an iron works shop to cut 3" wide angle iron into 6" lengths and drill bolt holes. These hold the horizontal beams to the posts for my wood trellis.
posted by jjj606 at 8:31 PM on May 17, 2005