Greenhouse build – day 2

First job for today (after a cup of tea) was to get the base concreted in. V and I eventually got the base square with its four feet in the holes we’d dug yesterday.

At this point I confess that I deviated from the instructions. The instructions suggest that you cement the legs down to a depth of 80cm, this being “below frost depth”.

Living in the “mild mild west” I decided that 80cm was pretty extreme! I also think that the most likely failure point in high wind will be how the greenhouse attaches to the base and not how the base attaches to the ground. Anyway we went for a more reasonable depth and concreted the base in:

All your base are belong to us – sorry, couldn’t resist the obvious gag

That’s it on the base for a bit as the concrete needs a while to ‘go off’.

My attention then turned to the greenhouse frame itself. I have to confess to being skeptical that these boxes contained enough bits to create the greenhouse structure:

Unfortunately I found that very few of the pieces were labeled. This meant I had to go through every piece and match it up with the part list using the “component identification” guide. This took 90mins! At the end of it I had all the parts accounted for and now had them labeled up so I could easily find them – why this couldn’t have been done at the factory is beyond me!

I then set about building the sides of the greenhouse. This went reasonably well. However, after shearing off two bolts, I decided that the alloy used to make the bolts wasn’t that good and so stopped tightening nuts with my socket set.

I soon had both sides built up and, with coverage of the F1 season finalé about to start on the TV, I decided to call it a day. Here are the sides of the greenhouse inside the base to protect them overnight:

PS I saw another speckled wood butterfly in the garden today.