Bluehouse
We have finished the 'Bluehouse'.
First stage was to collect all the bits from our friends place. They had them stored behind, beside or in various sheds on their section. I discovered I am allergic to rowans when I brushed against one and came up in almost instant welts!
Using the instructions, we sorted out all the bits of metal into piles on the lawn and decided that they were all there plus some that were spare. Myles is going to have to adjust the door as we are adding the extension to the dome that our friends bought but never setup.
My next job was to clean all the glass, that had been put into bundles and carefully covered in newspaper. I kept getting sidetracked by reading the articles. The glass had been covered in whitewash so I had to remove that and any putty and the odd bits of newspaper. Took ages...
Myles designed a gismo to hold the struts so that he could paint them, first in rust stop and then a nice dark blue. We went through a lot of spraycans!
Myles then had to work out what size the foundation had to be and build that. He included the path and sections in his design. Once that was made we set about putting all the frame together. Once again the instructions prevailed, and we had a dome sitting on our lawn. Myles tied it down as the wind was getting up, and we went to bed.
1am I woke up and thought something's changed. Woke Myles and we went outside. Yep the wind had changed direction and now we had a crumple sitting on our lawn. Myles did his best to straighten things and tie it down again, but it was quite sad.
We had to straighten out quite a few of the struts and repaint them, but then we just picked up the frame and put it on the foundation, where it became obvious that the bottom wasn't flat. Out came my husband's brilliance and he worked out how to change the various lengths of strut around to make it all sit flat. This did change the glass sizes though so we would have to get more glass, rather than using the glass that our friends had bought and stored for all those years.
As it turned out we would have had to buy the glass anyway as the stored glass was the wrong size! A hugh putty/silicon effort later and we had a glass dome.
Garden 2012
We have remade our berry patch. It now is over by the currents and gooseberries and is an arc shape of mesh that the canes can grow between. It is off the ground and was designed by us both but all the details were Myles’ as I am a big picture, awesome ideas person and he makes thing work.
Greenhouse is now going to be a dome shape as we looked at lots of square ones and tunnel houses, which I preferred cause I like curves and while getting some more berry plants from our friends Ian & Margret, Myles mentioned that we were thinking about a greenhouse. ‘We have one for sale... its a sun-dome’. Off I went to look at what these things do and how they work and how difficult they are to make etc. I decided that they were a cool idea but very expensive to buy as they were all big and usually used by commercial or schools etc. So we went back to I & M and looked at the info they had and the bits that were stored all over the place on their huge section. They bought their sundome in 79 so it is ~30yrs old and needs some love, but it wasn’t $7000 either! Now we just have to assemble the frame to work out what size to make the foundation and then persuade 6 people to help us move it onto the foundation and put in all the glass...
Myles is also getting a small shed to put over by his Pit so he can store stuff that is currently lying around the place like Heffies other tyres etc. We looked at another garage but size and price put it on the wish list, so we went for something more modest that would still be very useful.