Saturday, March 20, 2010

New $5.00 Log Cabin Greenhouse in Construction

This Greenhouse is dedicated to my Dad, who taught me the, what he called, "the Japanese method of building." What this method consisted of was just going for it...then cutting off whatever hung off afterwards.  My Dad inspired in me the art of building stuff, and my love of woodworking. Thanks Dad...
OK, so we started out with this old pheasant coop turned storage shed.
We had a bunch of old windows and just last week our friends Star and Tom gave us some more.... We also had a truckload of rips off of logs that another friend who has a mill traded to us..... I had a lot of nails, but not many the right size so had to spend the whopping $5.00 to get some nails.... I could have used more, but only had $5.00, so we get creative.
Then I drew up these very detailed blueprints (something I normally don't do...skipping that stage).
Next I cut and carted about 10000 pounds of wood from the front to the back yard....much work upon my spindly arms and legs...
Now seeing as how we have to do this little project without money, we can't use treated wood ....and this being the West side of Oregon wood gets wet and rots really quick, so we had these old concrete building blocks that we could set the wood up off the ground on.
Then I laid them out on a straight line ready to connect the posts.
Then the next day Taryn, (who had been in Portland for a few days with her Mom Julie and Sister Samantha and her boyfriend Thomas) showed up.   YAY, some helping hands.
We painted the bottoms of all the uprights to slow down rot there, then I sprayed some rubberized undercoating I had laying around on top of that...Thomas likes to do projects with me when he visits, last time helping build the wood shed out front...another engineering marvel.  So Thomas and I connected the posts to the blocks, and a crossmember across the top....and went and fetched the womenfolk for a little assistance standing it up. (all the wood was wet and weighed a ton).


Then I climbed up on the ladder and connected the roof boards to hold the wall up, so the womenfolk could head out and check out Yachats and wouldn't have to keep standing there all day.


Now the basic shape is up. Now comes the fun part of putting in all the different shapes and sizes and types of windows.
Here I am getting high on building.  I had to hand scrape out the boards with my Grandfathers old draw knife to get this window to fit.
Well it was gettin close to dinner time, and I was informed we were going to have an early birthday party for me since the fam was here...and Julie had been marrinating chicken to Barbeque so the next step was to cook that up...
This is as far as we got that day, not bad for a days work...
 


So we still have a few more windows to put on the bottom, and the side door and wall to put it in. (We have an old glass screen door on the chicken coop that we don't use down there so will move it up.)
Then when we get some money we'll get some greenhouse plastic and do the roof and whatever else needs fillin in.
It's going to end up looking like a 20 foot by 15 foot log cabin with lots of windows...Then we came inside and there was a wonderful Birthday meal with a Strawberry desert that Julie made....

PLUS I got some nice new socks and a pair of dark brown (YAY) Carhartts.  I was so glad for the dark brown because somehow I always seem to get my go-to-town coveralls dirty, and those light brown ones make me look like I've been rollin in the mud...

2 comments:

  1. What a wonderful day you had! I love Reading your posts and always feel inspire afterwards. Have a magical day today. Penny x

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