 The problem with this time of year is that it goes dark at 4pm - and whilst I just carry on working (with head torch and lamp) you just can't get a decent photo when you've finished the job! So...here are some pictures of an almost completed "Tim" greenhouse in accoya, painted in the colour of "green smoke". 
 Very nearly completed in this photo. The shelving has gone in - just some clearing up, a bit of sanding down and touch-up painting to do on the inside. This job was as much to do with the base as building the top and you can really see the slope I had to overcome when you look at the back of this structure. It's the first time I've needed ladders just to put the guttering up. 
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Well I took loads of photos of my greenhouse this week - but none of them compared to the ones my customer sent me the day after I returned home! So here it is in all it's glorious colour with many thanks to @gardeninggavin. Please see Gavin's gardening Instagram account for more amazing gardening pictures.  
It's the quality of all the materials which really gets me on this build. The greenhouse is made from accoya (50 year guarantee) with cast iron door furniture from Suffolk Latch Company and the best paint from Germany (Profilan) which should last over 10 years before you need to touch it up, and Grade A cedar shingles and cladding, Sandstone flooring and quaity Marley uPVC guttering which should never degrade. This building is going to be here for a very long time.   A lot closer to home for me this week. My customer in Chester wants a 2.5m x 2.5m greenhouse which just fits the area of garden he has in mind. It's still a generous width but the really bonus comes with the height which will easily accommodate the 2m high door I'll build and up to the roof line at 3.2m high. 
 I added a brick sided raised bed to one side - which a perfect place to plant tomatoes without worrying too much about them drying out if you are away for a few days.  It's so rare for me to make a second visit to complete the base - it's only happened a couple of times in all these years - and here I get two right after one another. This week is another straight-forward visit to complete the high walls, lay the inside flooring and brick sided raised bed.  
 A little more straight-forward than my last visit here - I just need to complete building the walls, lay the sandstone floor inside and build a separate cold frame. It rained quite a lot on the first day so the gazeebo, which I always carry, made a rare and useful apperance.   
 Another tricky base build this week. To be fair, it's always hard to tell if something is truly level until you start work on it - and it was soon obvious we had a problem. The doorway is about 1 1/2 foot higher than the rear so we're faced with a potential big drop down when you open the door. Another problem was that all the building materials could only be delivered near the road - which is on the other side of the house you can see in the photo below. I am so grateful that my customer has a ride-on mower and trailer I could use to move all the materials down to the site.  
 Unfortunately I ran out of time, and materials, this week. I'm going to lay another extra 4 courses around the base so that the front elevation is taller and will look in proportion with the completed greenhouse. I will compact a lot of hardcore on the internal floor which will lift the height as well and then lay the flooring slabs on a dry mix and add a small step under the doorway to lessen the height difference again. But this will have to do for this week.   This week I'm on the east coast of England to build the base for a greenhouse with attached shed for a professional gardener where space is limited. It's replacing a greenhouse and shed which once stood side by side. This one will be built from accoya with a cedar shingle roof for the shed, cedar cladding to the gable end. It will have lots of opening windows to the sides and roof, and a sandstone floor.
This is the "Mark" greenhouse built from Accoya with an internal brick-sided raised bed and concrete setts used for the flooring. This one was a long drive from home for me -between 7-8 hours and I seem to have a spate of these long-distance greenhouses over the next few weeks. Usually the extra distance doesn't matter too much as I stay over for the whole week until the job is complete, so the journey is only taken a couple of times but 8 hours feels like a full day before I've arrived! I must be getting older! Anyway, enough of that - check out the photos of this beautiful garden.....
 Great to be back in Somerset to complete the relatively small "Mike" greenhouse (2.8m long by 2.2m wide).
  Even the hand-lathed finials on the roof are made entirely from accoya - so the whole greenhouse is guaranteed for 50 years even if you do decide not to keep up the painting (which should last 10 years between touch-ups anyway). 
We moved a large trough onto flat ground around the back of the greenhouse and I diverted the drainpipe into it. My customer's next job is to add good soil into the raised beds inside and move the potted tomatoes inside. 
A beautiful, and very large, garden this week and I've been asked to build a "Mark" greenhouse right in the middle of some really nice established beds - it was a tight squeeze getting the materials and mixer in among the plants.
 It's hard to imagine how it's going to look when you just lay the battens on such uneven ground. There were many tonnes of soil to remove from inside to get everything down to a level point - thankfully the soil was quite easy to dig out and the ground was solid with a decent amount of clay to build the foundations up on.
There was so much rain on the 3rd or 4th day starting at around 2pm and going right through to 9:30 when I finished for the day. I managed to carry on working by digging out and laying foundations for the internal wall and cold frames outside. Finding a large tree root took some of the time too.
A few infill cuts to make to complete the floor and then brush in kiln dried sand to lock it all together. I'll do that when I return in a few weeks to build the greenhouse structure.  |
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