New greenhouse in the works

Call Cindy

Shortly before lunch today I knocked on our bedroom window to get Michelle's attention. I was outside standing on the roof of the porch and could see her sitting in her office. When she turned around, I said through the window, "Call Cindy." I had to repeat myself. Then she understood. Cindy of Amica Insurance has been calling us every few months since last summer to see if we'd finished the exterior of the house. I had just fastened the last board when I knocked on the window. Finishing the outside took longer than I had expected. Finally, Cindy will be satisfied.

Time to move on to the next project. An hour or so after I had given instructions to call Cindy, the Viking Lumber truck arrived with thirteen wood combination doors. The next project had arrived. The doors will fit into the openings of the screen/glass porch. For the last six months the porch has been my workshop. I spent the next few hours cleaning up and setting up shop around the corner next to the firewood. The screened porch is going to be one of the nicer spots in the house. Michelle has been pining for a porch since we first thought of house building ten years ago. The MQP is finally on its way! (MQP is the acronym we used on house plans to designate the porch. It stands for Michelle's Quest for Porch.) (And it's not a moment too soon because the phoebes have returned looking to nest on our porch!)

The Peak

Under the threat of rain, I managed to put up siding all the way to the peak on the west side. Last week I bought three clamps from an outfit in Vermont that sells snow guards and fastened them to the seams of the metal roof. Then I bolted a 2x6 across the clamps and used that as a base for a 16' ladder. It may look sketchy, but it's really quite safe. I've got what looks to be three more days on the siding. At the end of the day today, I started to assemble the base of the green house. It should be up and running by the end of April.

Spring

After a less than memorable winter, it seems as we've been enjoying spring for a few weeks now. I set up the old cold frame with spinach and mizuna, and I've already moved the bunching onions I grew from seed into a row in the garden and covered it with cloth. Of course, a spring snow storm could prove a challenge, but when the weather is this ridiculously nice it's hard to hold back. In our old garden in Brooklin, we usually started sowing the real cold hardy stuff in the middle of April. As soon as the ground can be worked. By that rule we could have been out there sowing peas a few weeks ago. Once the greenhouse is up and running, all the usual dates will change and we'll be cheating mother nature on both sides of the growing season.

Mark showed up today to tie up the last of the plumbing. The outdoor faucet, the outdoor shower mixing valve, and a filter. We discovered the need for a filter after our washing machine repeatedly failed to perform. The screens on the water line going into the machine kept clogging with sediment.

I have a long list of things to do from now until next winter. Finish the porch is the biggest project with the biggest price tag. Finish the siding. Install drains along the drip line on the north and south sides. Build book cases. Build desk and shelves adjacent to kitchen. Stairs. Trim everywhere. I doubt I'll get to it all.

Update

With spring right around the corner it's time to think garden. Last weekend I went to a meeting for the local community greenhouse project. They've got a near wholesale price on the materials and great design ideas, and while it's true that I'd like nothing more than to build a state-of-the-art greenhouse, it's also true that I have other uses for what would amount to a couple thousand dollars. When I built our first greenhouse about six years ago, I had to buy a 20' x 100' roll of greenhouse plastic when I only needed about a fifth of that. My plan, then, is to go with what I've got. For a couple hundred bucks in materials I can build a very basic greenhouse (12' x 32') and use the plastic I've got to cover it not once but twice (8 years worth). I'll use the greenhouse project folks to buy enough polycarbonate panels to make some nice cold frames to go inside the greenhouse for the winter.

I been slowly finishing the drywall returns on the windows upstairs. I looked into buying a sander that attaches to a shop-vac so I could finish the windows downstairs without covering everything we own with a layer of joint compound dust. But then I read a suggestion that was worth a try: Sand with one hand and hold the shop-vac hose underneath. For someone doing this sort of thing professionally, I suppose this arrangement would get tiresome, but for what I've got to do it worked like a charm.

Chickens are loving the weather. I've got to fence them in some time soon. We're getting about a dozen eggs a day. Half for us. Half for the neighbors. And every now and then we give a dozen to friends.

Plodding Along

I've been chipping away at a number of things over the past few weeks. As the pictures show, I managed to fashion a backsplash in the kitchen using the stone left over from the cutting of the countertop using a 7$ diamond blade in my circular saw. The blade was useless by the time I was making my last cut; what do you expect for 7 bucks? Looks nice though. Wiped it down with the same penetrating oil I used on the concrete floor. The chicken is no longer using my workshop/porch to lay eggs. I had to board up my exit to the outside to keep her out. I've moved to the next bedroom with the finish work. It's ready for another pink and green polka dot floor.

I've been making sketches of greenhouse to attach to the barn. There's a meeting of a greenhouse co-op this Saturday. A group of people have gotten together to order materials to get a bulk rate and save on shipping. This green house will have polycarbonate sheets for walls and roof, not plastic sheeting. The polycarbonate sheets last a lot longer and have a better insulating value. (A cross section looks a bit like corrugated cardboard.) This greenhouse would serve as winter chicken quarters and a hothouse for everything that needs a hothouse in Maine.

Backsplash and wayward chicken