A Greenhouse Raisin' In Photos

Anyone else out there have an amazing husband?  When I say I have an amazing husband, I mean, wow...  His skill and completely selfless generosity floors me.  One weekend, I asked him for some help to build a little cold frame out of PVC pipe, and what does he give me instead?  A wonderful 10'x12' wood framed greenhouse!  I'm a blessed farm girl : )

Having a greenhouse has completely transformed my confidence in the gardening department.  I'm one of those people that has always felt intimidated at the prospect of growing my food.  No doubt, a large garden requires a fair amount of labor, and I've always feared that nothing would grow, or I would do it wrong.  I'm also what you would call a "researcher."  Being driven to research and learn is not a flaw but I can sometimes take it to a point where I intimidate myself!  Anyways, with the greenhouse, I now know that I can provide my vegetable starts with an optimum environment, and can then transplant only the most robust and healthy plants into the garden space.

My husband and his dad completed this project in just three days!  They have experience and knowledge in the construction department however, so I hesitate to call this particular project a DIY type venture, unless you also have experience or knowledge about building a structure from the ground up.  I've posted a lot of pictures here, however, in chronological order, so that the process and steps can be seen, and perhaps give you an idea of how things went together.

This was a pretty frugal project especially considering the awesomely useful building we ended up with!  My favorite feature of the greenhouse is, without a doubt, the floors.  On our property, we have an above ground pool that is surrounded with a redwood deck.  We have decided that we would like to remove the pool (consumes too much energy, it's laborious and expensive to maintain, and it attracts aggressive wasps and hornets like crazy!), and so we are slowly taking it apart and repurposing all of the salvageable materials.  The floor of the greenhouse is made of 2x6 redwood planks that we pulled from the deck, which saved us A LOT of money!  We also opted to use an inexpensive 6mm plastic sheeting to cover the greenhouse.  Eventually we would like to change this out to a more permanent and durable material, but for now (and hopefully through next growing season too!) it works fantastically and allowed us to build a functional greenhouse NOW.  We also already had a lot of the hardware and all of the power tools on hand.  Overall, I believe we ended up with about $200 in the lumber and concrete blocks we used as the platform, $60 for the 6mm plastic sheeting (we bought a 100'x10' roll), and $30 for the door.  The door was an awesome find.  We are lucky to have a Habitat for Humanity ReStore in town.  This store is a DIY-er's dream!  It stocks reclaimed and leftover material's from Habitat for Humanity's building projects.  The door was reclaimed, all glass, with a sliding screened in window, that works perfect for ventilation.  

And here's some views of the inside.  We still need to install some tables around perimeter, and since the greenhouse is 10 feet wide there should be enough room to install a long narrow table down the middle too.