Weeks 5 and 6: In Repair

After the depressing news of the collapsed roof, the Dirt Bag Brigade built a new, sturdier roof. Alyssa and I spent last Saturday building a roof (attempting to build a roof, really.) Our plan was to build the roof with making 2 squares of 8 foot 2 by 4's. Somehow, even with measurements, we over-estimated the size of the greenhouse. We finished with only making one square which was placed on the poles left over from the first roof.

Alyssa and I quickly realized that we are not carpenters. Even growing up in households with handy-men for fathers, we could not build sturdy squares, and the one we did build took over an hour. So we gave up and decided to head to the greenhouse on Sunday and use the cordless drill, which we thought for sure would be much easier. Well, it wasn't.

The screw-driver had old, stripped

bits and we are both pretty incompetent when it comes to drills (we had the drill on reverse for a good 10 minutes.) After some time we finished the second square. at this point we felt pretty defeated so we decided to wait for another student (Dan) to help us stretch the plastic.

Thursday morning the three of us; Alyssa, Dan, and I were ready to finish the roof. We had a set-back, our two squares fell apart over the previous 4 days. This may have been a blessing because Dan thought of a better idea, a sturdier idea. We built one square with one board through the center to keep it level and sturdy. Dan is much better at building things than Alyssa and I, thank god Dan was there. Then we stretched the plastic tight and nailed it in to the dirt bags. We also used a staple gun. It looked much better, much more taunt than before.

Now we are going to see how well it holds up, and with-in the next couple of weeks I will re-plant some buckets and see how those do. We are going to keep a digital thermometer in the greenhouse to record the temperature so we have some data from the project.