Greenhouse

Putting up a greenhouse sounds fairly simple but as I’d been asked to help I suspected it couldn’t be that straight forward.

Though the instructions say two people should be able to do the job it is sensible to ask two friends to help. Ideally both of them should be left handed, at least one should have some mechanical experience and a good set of tools. If your greenhouse cost less than £250 then you will also need someone with a working knowledge of Czec, Hungarian or Romanian to translate the instructions. An example of the problem is that the English version says you need a spanner, this is a lazy translation of multi-socketed rotatable torque spanner, the sort of thing that comes in a plastic briefcase and costs as much as the greenhouse. In other words one friend must have a really serious set of tools. You will also need a first aid kit and at least 12 hours of daylight.

I was asked to help since working with multi dimensional statistical arrays for the DES I would be able to visualise what the finished greenhouse would look like and could also be useful fetching and holding things for the other two.

Instructions are a minefield at the best of times but these presented new challenges on each page. Terms like inside and outside, left and right cease to be mere technical abstractions when you are trying to piece the thing together guessing if you are working on the inside or the outside and does this bit go on the left or the right. Quite early on I wondered how the greenhouse would be fixed to the base but unfortunately didn’t push the issue. Half way through we found a set of brackets we should have used first and then had to undo the bottom before we’d fixed the top to fit these things in.

It went on like this, you turned a page to find we should have slid the bracket into place on the preceeding page before going onto tackle this bit so one step forward and one step back all the time.

The classic mistake we made was to assume that the four corner sections were the same. If we had looked closely we would have seen that three had 10 holes drilled in them while the fourth had eleven. The significance of the eleventh hole would not become apparent until the very last page on fitting the door. Effectively you only had a 1 in 4 chance of erecting the greenhouse successfully, we lost.

Having various bit left over at the end is worrying but also interesting as you can now see where they should have gone and when.

Perhaps the most important thing is not covered by the instructions at all. Are you sure this where your wife wants it to be? Are you really, really sure,? Does she appreciate that a greenhouse combines weight with extreme fragility and that “a bit more that way” could wreck a day’s work?

All in all I would say that we won’t be getting a greenhouse for our garden.