Building a Green House

The Greenhouse that Wouldn't Lie Down.

On my travels, I met a guy who had nearly finished building a green house. It had taken him two years! We got talking and I mentioned my Greenhouse website. He could hardly wait for me to finish my sentence before launching into his own tale:

"Building a green house is one of the most frustrating projects that I have ever undertaken. I have been involved in doing home repair kinds of things for years, so I am no stranger to the difficulty of making everything fit together, but I swear, I will never build a greenhouse again. I had honestly thought that building a greenhouse would be just like building a shed. Just assemble the frame and install the walls and, bingo – all done. Boy was I mistaken. I had no problem when I made my shed, but the greenhouse was a real nightmare.

D.I.Y. Fundamentalism is a Form of Mentalism.

"I should have listened to my friends who said that I should hire an outside contractor instead of building a greenhouse myself, but I was sure that I was up to it. Let me tell you, it was one nightmare after another. Think installing windows is a pain in the neck? Try building a green house, where every wall is made of absolutely nothing but windows and window frames! But that is not even the half of it. Oh no, not by a long shot.

"If you are building a garage or a shed, you have some leniency in terms of how things fit together. Sure, you assemble the basic frame as accurately and precisely as you can, but a millimeter here, half an inch there, and you're still good. But it's not the case if you are building a green house. Not the case at all. Imagine assembling your whole frame and finding that your window frames don't fit. Imagine trying to recut them - an expensive waste of time and money that does nothing at all to fix the problem - and then having to dig out your foundations and start again. Imagine burning it down for the insurance and calling it a day. Such is the nightmare of building a green house from scratch. Never again, my friend. Never again.

Plant Lovers Unite and Take Over.

"I had always thought that building a green house would be the ultimate project for a plant lover. It's sort of like decorating the nursery for your kid. It's the process of making a safe place for something that you love and treasure to glow and blossom. Now I realize the horrible truth. Building a greenhouse did just the opposite for me. It was six months before I could look at a plant!

"But now a year has gone by. I've begun to wander in and out of my greenhouse. After all the trials and tribulations, I have to admit that I now have something that I'd been wanting for a long time. It's still not finished, but it is no longer empty. Not by a long way."

Telling his story put this guy in a much better mood, and we yabbered on long into the night. But I couldn't help wondering if building a green house could really be so difficult. I'd never even considered the possibility of designing and building a greenhouse from scratch. There are simply too many good