Hello, and welcome to my steem blog!
Until a week or so ago, I didn't realize that I had never written about building the front half of the greenhouse that we have now. I thought about writing this because I've featured some of my old greenhouse posts on my Showcase Sunday posts. My last Showcase Sunday post featured my 3 part series on building the back half of the current greenhouse. If you'd like to read those posts, you can find then linked here.
https://steemit.com/showcase-sunday/@amberyooper/showcase-sunday-building-the-back-of-the-new-greenhouse
We started building the current greenhouse in the fall of 2016. The earliest pictures that I have of it are from late September of 2016.
As you can see, we started on the greenhouse while I still had tomato plants in the space that the greenhouse would occupy. There had been a raspberry patch behind the tomato plants, but I dug them all out before starting on the greenhouse.
The frame of the greenhouse was built with treated 4X4s set into postholes in the ground. All of the posts are at least 3 feet into the ground to be below the frost line so they won't heave up in the spring. We started with 6 4X4s for the basic frame uprights. We set the long wall to face south, that way we have good sun exposure, and the front roof slope also faces south. We set the posts for the south wall 8 feet apart, and the support posts for the roof are 6 feet back from that. Originally, we were just going to put posts for the back wall back another 6 feet, but we decided that we wanted more room in the back of the greenhouse for storage, so we added the taller posts 4 feet back from the support posts. Those posts became the supports for the top ridge of the roof.
In the picture above, you can see the roof rafters in place, and the storm windows that I salvaged from the old greenhouse to use here. I also used a storm door that I got somewhere for the door on the east side of the greenhouse.
On the west side of the greenhouse, I put 1 storm window , and left an opening for another door. I also had mounted a couple of PVC roof panels on the front of the greenhouse.
On the picture below, you can kind of see the truss that I built to span across the 16 feet for the ridge beam to hold up the top of the roof.
In this picture, you can see the west door mounted, and a plywood filler for the space behind the door. The old greenhouse was still standing at this time.
We finished up the east side by filling in all the spaces with plywood to close it in. I would have liked to use clear material, but it's expensive and I didn't have the money for it then. We also put 2 more pieces of PVC roofing on the front.
We ended up taking the PVC panels off the front and putting them on the roof so we wouldn't have to buy so many roof panels to cover the roof. The reason for the green panels on the top of the roof is because the place we were buying the panels from ran out of the clear ones, but they still had some green ones.
The front also got a good coat of paint while it was uncovered.
Because we couldn't get anymore clear PVC panels that fall, we ended up just covering the front with sheet plastic for the winter. We just closed up the back of the greenhouse with a tarp for the winter.
In the spring of 2017, we were able to get more of the PVC panels, so we pulled the sheet plastic off the front and replaced it with the PVC panels.
That finished up the front half of the greenhouse except for later replacing the green panels on the roof with clear ones. The panels on the top part of the roof were standard 8 foot long panels that we cut in half to fit the space. The good thing about that is that we only needed half as many panels to do the top part as it took to do the bottom part of the roof.
That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by to check out this post!
