The ridge beam arrives and we practice ladder safety.

It is Friday, the end of the working week for the two retired labourers, although we may do some staining at the the weekend. It was priority today to construct and place the ridge beam down the centre of the structure, the design of which required an old fashioned diagram to work out the roof pitch, ridge beam height and length, which is longer than the greenhouse 145.75" to cater for a rafter at each end to ensure that the total of seven rafters on each side can be at the correct pitch for the six polycarbonate panels and snap H-channels.

Ladder safety was important because of the height getting up there, 110" now to the top, the ridge beam should give the greenhouse rafters a slope of about 22.5 degrees or thereabouts. Additional work done today was the reinforcement of the step plate at the bottom of the door and as mentioned yesterday, the far right corner has had a tie added to true up the second wall and add to the XY rigidity.

I was on the top step of the ladder and I told Karen that "I can see your house from here" and I was careful not to drop power tools, clamps or large pieces of wood on her head.

It has now been just three weeks since we purchased the door and the single pane wooden windows and the current expenditure sits at around $385 which includes all wood, stain, screws, glass and polycarbonate roofing materials. There will be some hardware needed, some hurricane brackets for the rafters, perhaps some plates here and there, but it seems that our $500 budget is more than enough.

As an update, this afternoon we bought 32 x H1A Simpson Hurricane Brackets and 13 x A35 corner brackets for $40 cash from a local chap who had saved them from a jobsite dumpster. The retail cost from Home Depot would have been $143.92 so it was a great deal and the expenditure sits at $425 with very little now to buy besides short screws and caulk which we may already have. 

The barn of many planes and angles.

The greenhouse continues to evolve, and today we erected wall number two or the "far end" of the structure and another set of pivot blocks and XZ ties were used in a similar fashion to make the wall approximately square to the approximately level base. 

The whole frame is surprisingly square, despite our low standards.

It was quite a bit of fun, especially when installing the two upper side beams which involved stretching, ladders, some danger and balance, all of which went together quite well and the fore and aft stiffness (XZ) of the structure is good, some play in the side to side stiffness (XY) at wall two end, but that is expected as it is weaker in that plane than wall one with the stiffness of the 4" x 4" door posts and the play will reduce each time we add more side wall, or populate the middle rectangle of that second wall, which will include a (free) fitted 35" x 59" two pane window and wood in the lower 20" or thereabouts. 

There may eventually be short 45 degree inner ties at each corner to increase the stiffness and provide more real estate for hanging baskets. We will leave those until later as we observe how continuing the greenhouse with the wood framed windows increases the rigidity. There will definitely be at least one temporary external tie beam installed in the XY plane to pull wall two so that a small, mostly optical, vertical offset is corrected on that stud wall, that will be on the lower far right side.

 

There will be many opportunities to hide tolerance gapping, which we have decided is more of a feature than a flaw. There are some slightly out of plane uprights which will be corrected, or disguised, as time goes by, but after all, we don't really care as it is our greenhouse, made with our own hands on a really low budget, and our own tomatoes and peppers will taste far better than any from a five star construction costing ten times as much.

The next stage is to reinstall the front door step and then paint/stain the structure before the next phase, we're not decided on the roof design yet, but we have the materials so that could be next.  

Building the barn, part one

The weather at the moment is perfect and after creating the two side beams, today was the day to start "building the barn" which involves erecting the two ends to be (almost) level and then joining the two ends with the 145.75" beams.

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that the original beams were to be approximately 145" long and then later, when we assembled the lower base frame, the number was measured as an average 145.75" showing the amazing precision of our joining process and how tolerances stack when you just don't care!

There are 2" x 4" top plates on walls one and two, the side top plates will sit on top of that, so a composite top plate of 145.75" - 7.00" = 138.75" is needed along with wiggle room of 0.25" per end, so the "hanging top plates" on the side are 138.25" which leaves a 3.75" gap at each end that can be used to attach to both walls.

It matters not, just numbers, too many numbers.

The door wall, wall number one, was raised using those two little pieces of wood as pivot blocks, once in a vertical position we then used our steel right angle for a rough guide and then used a 3' x 4' x 5' tie arrangement (classic right angled triangle) to lock all into place. Then it was a case of screwing down the wall to the base. It was a lot of fun and the pair of us put some work in and had a giggle, for the first time in the construction a ladder was used to correct a joint at the top right end of the wall, this thing has height now!

This wall is now very firm in the XZ direction due to those ties, mostly level and mostly square. The two side top beams can be seen in the photo, fully constructed and ready for the raising of wall number two to an upright position, which should be tomorrow. 

We commented yesterday that the structure coud not be seen from the road, that changed today!

Wall number two

Another day goes by and we made ourselves busy by creating the second end of the greenhouse. This assembly will be called wall number two. 

This one seemed to be a little easier than the other, it was also less heavy so moving it over to the job site was not so bad. There we have it, the two ends completed and lying on top of the base frame and we think that the next bit will be to "build the barn" and create the structure, which will require a couple of temporary pieces of wood to act as ties in the XZ direction and guides to make wall one square with the frame, followed by two 145.5" composite beams to connect wall one and two together. 

It may even require an extra pair of hands.

After that, we can start adding wood and windows and start thinking about a roof structure.

Wall number One.

This morning we went to pick up another double paned window from a local chap on marketplace, we have not done a full inventory yet, but believe that we have about 80% of the required glass.

It makes sense then, that we need places to put the glass, and in this case, the door that we picked up just a few weeks ago. It was a case of jotting down a sketch of the door end, after all, the 111" that the frame measures is not by accident, we need to be able to fit one 30" x 77" door and two pieces of 34" x 76" glass from one side of the patio doors, the 4x4 door frame and the 2x4 end studs.

We will call this wall number one, another component in the kit for the vertical walls, wall one (door) and wall two (far end) with initially two 145" cross beams to keep the pair of them up, almost square, and almost level.

There it is, wall number one, 111" wide and 83" tall. This was the heaviest piece that we actually had to move in one assembly, but of course, we managed. The second wall will be constructed, probably tomorrow, along with two 145" composite beams that will sit on top of the two ends. Interim 45 degree supports will be added for some semblance of squareness and rigidity, and then when we are happy, we will paint the vertical frames before installing windows.

Wednesday : A square, level foundation, well, mostly...

Today a couple of hours spent joining the four sides together with two goals in mind, well maybe three if you include position in relation to the shed and fence. The first plan was to make the corners square so that it creates a rectangle, not a parallelogram, we used a couple of techniques to achieve that, the first being 3 nails, tapped in at 3' and 4' distances and on one corner and then measuring to achieve a 5' hypotenuse. 

After that, we threw caution to the wind and used a large metal square for the other corners, surprisingly we created a pretty good representation of a rectangular base, all of the joints being very unprofessional with multiple toenail screws going in left, right and centre. The second task was to make the sides level with each other, which meant moving some gravel about over many iterations, but again, we did it.

The result is an almost square, almost level, frame for our greenhouse build.

It is time to take a short break from the project, we are off up to Port Renfrew for a well deserved break, looking at nature and the bottom of a glass.

Tuesday : The End Bits

Three days have passed since the construction of the "side bits" and after doing some preliminary painting (staining) yesterday, we assembled each beam with many screws and have almost finished the "end bits" for the greenhouse foundation. It should be noted that on Sunday we bought two more gallons of stain, this time from the Restore, Habitat for Humanity, for the grand price of $18.19 a gallon, so there will be a lot more brushwork involved during this project, some of which will be later on today to finish off these two beams on the unseen sides.

In theory, we should be able to screw the sides and the ends together on Wednesday and as previously mentioned, we will attempt to position the finished 12' 1" x 9' 3" frame as level and as square as we can on our gravel base, I suspect there will be some fun and perhaps a little frustration during that levelling process! - but to check if the frame is square, we will use a bit of old fashioned trigonometry.