Monday, September 05, 2011

Garden Construction Project: Building a Hoop House PART 2

After the exhausting long weekend of preparing for, getting through and recovering from Irene, it was nice to get back to normal and have a holiday weekend to continue work on the hoop house.

The next step was to affix the hip board to the south side of the house. This is to help with the roll up ventilation. Hopefully, water and snow won't pool above it too much.

It was fastened to the hoops with c shaped pipe straps. Even though it is a metal to metal contact, it is a tight fit and doesn't slip! (Our back up plan, if they had slipped, was going to be cutting bits of old bike inner tubes to squeeze between the contact points.)

The hip board was attached to the end hoops with a self tapping screw. There are two rows of wiggle wire track on the hip board as we need to have eyelet screws in between for lacing the anti billow cord over the roll up ventilation section.

Here is how the wiggle wire track looks on one of the end walls.

All potentially sharp or rough edges were covered with felt tape.


The plastic was cut to length (we have a roll that will cover it twice). Then, we started pulling the plastic over the hoops and temporarily secured it with clamps and 'tacked' it down with the wiggle wire in places until it was pretty well aligned and tight. Then, all the wiggle wire was snapped into place.

Progress shot. The rolled up part will become a proper roll up side for ventilation. We need to assemble some pipes and attach a handle/crank. It will be further secured with anti billow rope laced between the hip and side boards. A couple of narrow strips of plastic will be attached at each end, between the hip and side boards. Having this double layer at the ends will help keep out the wind.

Inside the 'bubble'!

So, still remaining to do is the roll up ventilation, neatening up the ends of the plastic on the end walls, cutting the doors to size and mounting them on hinges and deciding what latches to use. I think after that, all I have to do is get planting!

3 comments:

Kristen said...

This is some DIY project. I hope you won't be too tired out to get all the planting done!

2paw said...

That's a major hoop house. I am amazed at how hard you have worked and how great it looks. No wonder you are ready for planting!!

Unknown said...

Did you apply the plastic length wise or across the arched roof and how did you seal the layers of plastic? Glue? Some kind of plastic weld? Tape? I assume it has to be air tight to prevent cold air leaking in. How did you seal it up?