A dispatch from longtime commentor & master gardener OpieJeanne:
At top: I thought people would like to see the new greenhouse we put up after last year’s fire on December 23.
The old greenhouse was a cheapie from Harbor Freight in 2013. 10′ x 12′ for $650. We had modified it, reinforced it, added an exhaust fan and vent louvres in the gable ends, replaced the original polycarbonate panels with heavier ones because they were not coated to prevent UV damage as promised, etc. Every time a car went through our fence at the corner (once or twice a year), we salvaged the lumber for benches and the interior frame, and some shelving above the door and along the back.
Last summer we had it functioning really well and grew a massive tomato plant inside the greenhouse, among other things.
The fire inspector couldn’t determine the cause of the fire; he asked if we had any enemies. I think it was just another crappy bit of 2020, giving us the finger as the year wound down, but it could have been a far worse year: we lost no one to COVID-19 and none of our family or friends got sick.
Our homeowners insurance covered it and we had receipts for replacement panels and equipment, and lots of photos of the interior of the greenhouse so they could see what we lost, plus photos of the remains of tools. They threw nearly 3 times as much money at us as we thought we’d get, which paid for the new greenhouse and tool replacement. They must have figured labor into the settlement, which we hadn’t considered adding to the loss because we have no idea how long it took to make it what it was.
The new greenhouse has thick safety-glass walls and a thick polycarbonate roof. It was shipped with panels assembled in sections, so assembly was a lot easier.
Oh, and due to the pandemic, the waiting time for a greenhouse was 4+ months. Everyone took up gardening last year. We ordered it in January, got it in May a couple of weeks later than they estimated because the glass was on back-order due to the pandemic.
As a result, our garden is way behind schedule and we are still fighting the weeds. I have some garden photos that have no weeds in the picture, but I might include a shot of an impromptu “meadow” in bloom. I hate buttercup.
smike
Very nice. Congrats.
Gary K
Bicycles seem to be on long back-order now, too. Covid-related?
?BillinGlendaleCA
Very nice new greenhouse, I see Mr. OpieJeanne did the assembly.
Jay
I like buttercups,
In moderation.
Jay
@Gary K:
yup.
Kayla Rudbek
@Gary K: oh yes. Less supply and higher demand due to people biking instead of taking mass transit. Bike parts are in short supply as well, so the local bike stores have notices up on their websites.
Yutsano
Oh that looks lovely! I’m glad something wonderful is coming from a tragedy.
laura
I have outbuilding envy. In my garden fantasy life, there’s a sacred pilgrimage to Berkeley Freight & Salvage that results in a garden shed/outdoor pavillion made of old doors. I have no carpentry skills to speak of- just big dreams of recycling a stack of like items with character.
Jay
@laura:
nice.
mvr
That’s impressive work!
I was just wondering whether it made sense to enclose one of our raised beds to allow growing broccoli and cauliflower in the Spring and fall while allowing for other plants in between. Almost had the broc & cauli working starting them indoors and planting 5 weeks before the frost date, but hot weather seems to cause bolting anyway.
Nice new greenhouse! You must be proud.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Nice. Very Nice.
Where can you order one?
Kristine
So sorry you had to deal with the fire, but the new greenhouse is lovely
It’s currently raining hard here in NE Illinois! Glad for my trees. I watered the flowers and shrubs these last few weeks, but the trees were on their own.
mvr
@Gary K: Nearly every outdoor-activity-related market is hot and has been for about a year. One of my hobbies is fisheries conservation and fly fishing. Apparently demand for fishing gear is through the roof causing supply chain issues.
We were in Yellowstone/Teton last week, where many/most lodges are still at less than full capacity and most campgrounds closed. The traffic was insane, especially in Yellowstone where there were still more closures than in Teton.
CaseyL
The new greenhouse looks fantastic! – and I now have Garden Envy. (Townhouse = no yard.)
We may have a hotter than normal summer here in the PNW. Your veggies may do very well very quickly, as long as you keep them watered.
Best of luck!
Gvg
Yeah, all gardening supplies are backed up. Have been all year. My local nursery remodeled and put in fancy paving and new benches. They said they had had the best year ever. Seed suppliers are still selling out.
I am noticing really odd things have been out lately that weren’t earlier. I had to give up caffeine and switched to diet root beer awhile ago. The last 6 weeks multiple stores are frequently out of it. Other groceries are having supply issues too. I can’t figure out why specific things.
BeautifulPlumage
So sorry for the loss, especially after you had it fitted out so nicely. The new one is lovely and should make a happy nursery.
The cars through the fence thing is concerning. Can’t the county, or whoever maintains the road put up a barrier?
Cheers to you & Mr. OJ…hope to have a meetup soon!
BeautifulPlumage
One of the weird things in short supply is 16 gauge wire hangers. We use them for tablecloths at work and they are hard to find. Other sizes seem fine.
Morzer
You guys certainly did build back better. Congratulations!
StringOnAStick
Bikes and parts are hard to get. My 2005 super light racing mountain bike had the front shock fail, and that’s old enough that newly made parts do not exist. We found a replacement on EBay and also found the “locals” bike shop that did a great job and threw no ‘tude because it’s an old bike, unlike the last shop I used where we lived in CO. I’m short and 62; I don’t want the new 29″ tires and heavy frames, so I love my carbon fiber bike from right before everything got more extreme and people started breaking frames. I just like cruising around in the woods, not hucking jumps.
Today was the first day this fire season where we woke up to smoke, a fire near Warm Springs, OR. Considering how dry it looked around there when we drive through last winter, I guess I’m not surprised. I’m concerned though, it’s dry and the snowpack was half of average.
prostratedragon
Nice recovery, opiejeanne. Looks like a lovely place to work in.
prostratedragon
Chicago area folks, check your media: bigtime storm warnings.
Delk
@prostratedragon: we got the alarms on our phones. Bit of lightning happening now.
opiejeanne
@?BillinGlendaleCA: We had help from our daughters’ SOs. They went to get the next panel and left him holding up those two corner pieces.
opiejeanne
@Jay: You should be in moderation for that crack.
I like them in fields, far away from my garden where they can’t choke the life out of the plants I want to grow.
C Stars
@laura: Wait…Berkeley Freight & Salvage? You will find some folksy tunes there but no doors, I think.
OpieJeanne: The new greenhouse is beautiful, worth the wait. Your yard is lovely too. I think I did a jigsaw puzzle of a greenhouse that looked something like that.
opiejeanne
@laura: There is a shed in the background, to the left of the barn-like building. It was a chicken coop, built out of scraps of lumber by the previous owner, and she probably pinched some of it from active construction sites. She was like that. The windows and doors are all salvage pieces, except for two small windows on the front that mr opiejeanne built for me. The hardware for them is all salvage, too. We have several places around Seattle where we could shop for wonderful salvage stuff.
opiejeanne
@mvr: Not proud, but definitely thrilled. Also a little intimidated because it is such a serious greenhouse, unlike the previous one.
Kelly
@StringOnAStick: The smoke is blowing all the way to the Willamette Valley. Not enough to smell but visible haze and that odd smoke filtered light. Plenty of well rested fire crews but… Yikes! I don’t need this.
opiejeanne
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: There are lots of places that sell greenhouses online, through Amazon and various other stores. This one was from Santa Barbara Greenhouses, and was on sale, shipping was free, and the cost to have it partially assembled before shipping still didn’t bring it up to what it would have cost not on sale. We looked at a lot of online catalogs before settling on this one.
We briefly considered buying another one from Harbor Freight and discarded that idea almost immediately. We put the old one together and were down to the last three bolts, and only had two that were usable, even with the extras that were in the box.. Quality control was terrible, and many bolts were non-functional. Shockingly, it was some oddball size/design that you can not buy anywhere in this country, so we made Harbor Freight open the last one they had in stock and find us a good bolt. .
About 50 miles north of us, in Mount Vernon, WA, there is Charley’s Greenhouses. You can look at several different company’s greenhouses, assembled on their lot and inside their offices. They send out a catalog on request and you can buy online from them, but every time we have a windstorm, they have damaged greenhouses on their lots.
opiejeanne
@BeautifulPlumage: The county needs to make our corner a 4-way stop, but they refuse to do so, and they refuse to put in a guard rail. Our house faces on 168th at the corner of 143rd, and heading north on 168th from our street there is a stop sign. The extension of 143rd to the east of the intersection is a narrow lane serving two houses, and also has a stop sign. Eastbound on 143rd to northbound on 168th is a big curve, and people take it too fast. We’re on the southwest corner, and thank goodness our house is away from the corner or we would have had cars in the living room.
Jay
@opiejeanne:
rent a bx 25 from Home Despot, buy gravel, put in a berm.
dirt walls seem to slow down cars,
still like buttercups in moderation,
m
Gretchen
Refrigerators are hard to get too. We’ve been trying to buy one since November. A friend lost her kitchen cabinets to a water leak, and won’t be able to get new until at least September.
guachi
@Gary K:
Yes. Massively increased demand and supply issues have most bike shops scrambling for stuff to put on the show floor. Took two months for my bike to arrive as it was a very expensive custom model. The merely expensive model would have taken 15 months.
HumboldtBlue
Last night it was a cat and the orchestra.
Tonight, Dog would like a word.
raven
@laura: In “The Detectorists” one of the main character’s great desire in life is to have a shed
Crook’s Andy, who does dispiriting and menial temp work—as Crook did before he began acting—in support of a fledgling family, dreams of becoming an archaeologist and aspires to own a shed. Neither has prime-time-TV looks or leads a life of high stakes. But when they’re wearing their gear and walking the countryside, they’re transformed into time travelers and explorers, experts in their specialized field and upstanding representatives of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club, a collection of misfits run with military ardor by a retired policeman named Terry, who’s always alert to the risk of rival detectors encroaching on their claims.
raven
@guachi: Two really good shops in Athens have had to close.
KrackenJack
@mvr: KrackenJill and I were in Yellowstone Memorial day weekend. Opening Day for Yellowstone Lake Lodge. Bit of a madhouse. By Monday they were closing off parking areas. Lots of facilities closed or at partial capacity and no easily accessible information about it – especially without wifi.
Still there was enough wildlife to make us jaded and give idiots a chance for their YouTube moment.
Mary G
That is gorgeous! Next year I would love to see what is growing in it when you have it for the full season.
All kinds of things seem to be out of stock. While I was having the bathroom redone, I took the opportunity to have an electrical plug put in the dining room wall behind the shower. We had to move the sideboard my mom bought in the early 60s and a leg broke off and the frame cracked. I would’ve thought it would be easy to buy another, but no. The one I like best is at Ikea and is out of stock; they can’t say when or if it’ll be available again. Pottery Barn has a smaller similar one for three times the price, but it wouldn’t come until November. This is very much a first world problem, and there are plenty of hideous ones available now, but still.
frosty
@mvr: @KrackenJack: We went to Arches on Sunday of Memorial Day weekend and got there at 9:30 to see a sign that said “Park is full. Come back in 2 or 3 hours”. When we got there 2 days later at 8:30 we got in after a half hour wait. When we went the next day at 4:00 we breezed in. The ranger said it wasn’t the holiday, that this is normal for the park now.
frosty
@Mary G: There has to be a cabinet maker around who can fix that for you. We had a friend of my BIL build custom cabinets for our kitchen. Check around … yelp maybe? There should be a lot of independents doing this kind of work.
opiejeanne
@Jay: Can’t do that. There’s an easement that the county owns, about 10 feet wide. That’s well inside of our fence line, and there are a lot of trees just inside the fence; big trees, that we are responsible for.
My husband is a Civil Engineer. He knows how to design corners to prevent this sort of thing, and knows how to write up a legal report for action on problem corners. He’s retired from a large city in Southern California. Our house is in the county, not an incorporated city, and counties everywhere are notorious for not wanting to do anything unless they are forced to. He wrote them a letter that was really a traffic study, explaining exactly what they needed to do and they ignored it. He wrote them a new one citing the lack of sight distance heading east on 143rd because it’s on a hill. They told us they won’t do anything. They put up some new signs with BIG ARROWS warning that the turn is coming up in December, and a few days later, January 1, a kid who was not drinking but was driving in the rain and going way too fast took out the newish fence.
This corner would never be legal inside a city, not any place he’s worked and I can’t imagine it would be legal down the hill in Woodinville, but the corner has been like this since before there was water on the hill, when it only had a couple of farmhouses with wells and if you ran off the road you ended up in a ditch or a pasture.
opiejeanne
@Mary G: Thanks. I’m a little intimidated by it, but we’ve been cranking out seedlings from the moment the roof was up. We now have a little solar panel that runs an exhaust fan, which kept the temp down to 102 F today. Plants like tomatoes think it’s heaven, as long as they have water.
sab
You guys reports of supply chain disruptions make sense to me now.
My favorite plant nursery lost it’s owner ( founder’s widow) to cancer this year. She had set up a good succession plan, but they seem to be running sparse on inventory. Not the plants. The pots, and hooks for hanging plants. That sort of stuff.
I had thought that whoever was in charge was just winding things down, but supply shortages make more sense.
sab
I have a momma deer in my fenced yard this summer, eating all the potential blackberries and smashing down the shrubbery. Pitbull is afraid of her. Cocker spaniel is of course oblivious. So now we can’t even let the dogs out to pee.
She was the deer I was laughing about interfering with realtor house showings next door. She jumped the fence to my yard. Useful lesson to me about ill-wishing others.
Brian
@Kayla Rudbek: Maybe depends on where you are. I’m in SoCal (Inland Empire for the locals), and my LBS is fully stocked, and I was able to get new chainrings for my ’90s MTB.
J R in WV
Greenhouse is beautiful, I hope you have many years of joy from it!
Regarding your traffic issues, Perhaps consider hiring a contractor to set V large boulders (like 4 footers) just inside your property line with a dump truck and excavator, just lined up a foot apart. Maybe with shrubs around if you don’t like the looks of the rocks.
Other option could be extremely solid close set fence posts, as in 8 ft pieces of RR rail set 4 feet deep, even into concrete, and 2 feet apart, inside the property line.
Last option would be to sue the county for not correcting a dangerous situation they have been made aware of. Are you friends with a nearly retired lawyer?
opiejeanne
@J R in WV: Long story short, we already have those rocks, but they’re in the county right-of-way because the fence is in that same strip. The county sent a cop to tell us they’d like us to remove those lovely big stones because there had a been a complaint, and we told him very politely that we would donate them to the parks department but they’d have to come and get them. Nothing has happened.
Cars have hit those rocks and dragged them 30-40 feet inside the fence. They’re big, but not big enough to kill anyone, and the cars that come through our fence are usually going about 60, try to turn but can’t, and being drunk doesn’t help. Them, not me.
Origuy
I took my 90s era mountain bike to my local shop to get it fixed up; I hadn’t ridden it in years. I was looking at new bikes but almost none of them had prices. The guy at the shop said they turned over so fast he didn’t have time to put tags on them. He put on new tires and shifters; now all I need is to get my body back in shape so that it doesn’t hurt after I’ve ridden it.
Mel
What a beautiful greenhouse!
Thank you so much for sharing this.
opiejeanne
@Mel: It’s very pretty, and today the temp inside it hit 110f, with the exhaust fan running and all of the vents open, the south wall and roof painted with shade paint, and shade cloth on the roof. I think the high here was 90f, and the PNW is going to set records for heat all this week.
The tomatoes and peppers are happy at high temps as long as they have water, but this is too much heat; I’m going to have to move their pots outside just so they survive.