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The story of our stroller ramp

The story of our stroller ramp

wooden stroller rampThis is the English summary of the previous German blog post where I tell the story of our stroller ramp. We have two wonderful daughters, 1.5 years and 2 months old. The big one is just not big enough to walk longer distances, the small one is far from walking at all. Obviously we needed some kind of double stroller, the Phil & Teds Sport turned out to be the ideal model. While the stroller is cool, trendy, and indeed really sporty, it is still designed to carry two kids, and two kids actually weigh in quite a bit. So in order to overcome the five stairs in front of our house, we decided to construct a wooden stroller ramp. It was just perfect, until some neighbors complained at the administration company, who highly encouraged us to remove the ramp (read: we had to remove the ramp until a certain date). I am not sure if there is a right or something to have a ramp in front of the house where you have rented an apartment in, maybe for wheelchair users, but as I said, I am not sure for strollers. So what I did was activate the Social Web rather than fight with the property owners.
  • First, I blogged the whole story
  • Second, I sent the link out to the administration company
  • Third, I put up the ramp for sale on eBay
  • Forth, I put up an AdWords campaign targeted to Hamburg, Germany, where I advertised the auction
  • Fifth, I twittered once and twice about the whole story
  • Sixth, I submitted the story to Digg
Finally we sold the ramp for 50.48€, you can still see the auction page until eBay eventually will take it down after I think 30 days. The person who bought it was a wheelchair user who came up all the way from Cologne, Germany to Hamburg, Germany:
map Cologne to Hamburg
Funny enough my blog ranks #3 for the search term kinderwagenrampe (German for stroller ramp) on Google now, the #1 hit being the story at Digg. Anyways, to close the story, our raw material cost (wood, bolts) was about 90€, plus three men's work on a Saturday afternoon. The way we handle climbing the stairs with the two babies now is that the big one has to get off the stroller, stand still at the last step, while either Laura or me somehow pull the stroller upstairs. If you happen to need a viral campaign for your story, just let me know…

Images from myself, and the Static Maps API