Greenhouse Growing
Welcome back to the Farm Life Farm Blog. As we continue to work on the greenhouse with every free moment, the progress is apparent. I cannot believe how long its been since I worked on a post. The persistent problem remains to be energy. At the end of a workday, whether teaching or building, I don't have the energy to type.
The last post ended with the completion of the flat roof deck. We have since covered it with corregated metal roofing and flashing on the facia. Closeup of the flashing does not look great, but the wrinkles make it pop from a distance, especially early in the summer morning sun.
This was a fairly easy part of the build. I must admit that the slight pitch did mess with my balance of the hours I was up there.
Prior to the flashing, we installed wall connector flashing for the polycarbonate roofing. I have included an image below right, but it is a clear plastic thing so it does not look like much. I also tried having AI darken the image but what it created
looked much like a fleshlight and ...anyway.
So this is a 4 foot long piece. The back edge is a lip that I screwed into the facia board. The front edge is a 6 inch wide strip of the corrugated roofing. The roofing panels then sit on under the 6 in strip ensuring water keeps running away from the facia. we then used a single sheet of flashing, under the flat roof metal and over the wall connector flashing.
This is a stage you want to take a moment and plan. every piece of the roof has to lock into the next piece and ensure that water will flow, while also ensuring that wind cannot blow the rain and snow back into the roof structure. Get the roof wrong now, and you will be fixing leaks forever.
All the roofing was a four day process for us. At the end, we are pleased with the roof and think it looks pretty good, just uneven enough for Sarah and I to like it, but not so far off that it looks like it will collapse. If you remember our sawmill shelter; we built that to appear it is falling over.
Sarah went to camp while I began the front windows. Probably best as this was a trial and
error to find what would fit equally. It is certainly an idiosynctoy, but things need to be equal bilatteraly but not level or plum. The four outside windows are all the same and I did have two others I intended to add to this wall. It dawned on me as I began the windows, that the support structure for the windows was gonna take more space and wood than I expected.
The header and Sill plate were an issue as I would have liked a 10 inch header, however there was not enough room. Had I really known what I was doing, I would have measured the windows first and built the front wall one foot taller to allow for more support wood, however, the 6in header is sufficient to carry the load. The King studs and Jack studs were a bigger issue for me.
As you can see in the framing image below, each window requires a king stud to carrier the roof weight and two jack studs to support the header. Therefore, every two windows has eight inches of solid wood between them. That is a total of 40 inches of sun-blocking wood over the 15 feet of front wall. During the winter, the first three hours of sunlight will be shining though these windows. Time will tell how detrimental this wood will be. I do admit, that less sunlight will be better than a building collapse. I was going to use a fifth of theses windows, but I could not get it to fit evenly without ripping boards down, which would have been an additional couple inches of wood. The center window is 3 and a half inches wider than the other four and fit beautifully.
The east wall is our next mission. The west wall will have a double door so we can get the water tanks and the tractor bucket in in the future. We will also be adding a walk-through door into the "tractor doors". That is gonna be a challenge, so I am starting with the east wall and the walkway inside. Quite frankly, I am tired with climbing in and out and thought stairs would be nice.
I began with the Pony wall that runs the span and is as tall as the roofing is, about 20 inches. I did the pony wall in two sections for my own convenience and due to the length of 2x6's I had. They were about four inches too short even after cutting them. The door was my next challenge. I needed the pony wall to be able to figure out where the door would fit. This is the only place along the wall the doors I have .
would fit. This one is a storm door. I will install the glass once I am fairly certain I wont break it bringing wood in and out. Once the door was framed and swinging free, I started on the platform/walkway. You can clearly see the framing for the doorway platform in the image to the right. I started with that and then added a support board from the back doorway to the east door platform. With the platform being 30 inches long and the back doorway being 46 inches, this support board angles in toward the platform. Each floor joist is cut on the angle and will sit on top of the support boards. The walkway is also set about 6 inches lower than the east platform. The stairs will extend from the
walkway where it meets the platform. We will then walk in the door, turn hard right, step onto the walkway, hard left onto the stairs.
This is as far as we have gotten and are quite pleased with our progress. The platform will start our next post.
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