A new green/glass/poly house/tunnel

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We’ve been extremely fortunate to have been offered a fantastic greenhouse for free if we dismantle it transport it to our site and assemble it again.

Preparation

A wooden base had been prepared in advance based on the measurements taken of the brick base it was coming from.
Also in advance of the dismantling we started to prep a base on site where it was quickly discovered that we’d underestimated the slope of our site such that on one side the greenhouse will be almost on the ground and at the other ~1m above the ground.
After digging post holes for the end of the structure, smashing away at boulders in the area and being very free with pickaxes etc we discovered that we were just centimetres away from the water pipe going up the site. We all thought it was a few meters further over – oops – but no harm done.

Dismantling

This thing is huge, approx 6m x 4.5m (20x15ft) and extremely well built.
It was a real team effort, although this picture only has 2 people in it, most of the day we had about 8 people working on it, perhaps 3 or 4 at a time doing the dismantling but another 4 or 5 back and forth all day carrying all the pieces up a very long steep garden to our trailer.
Dismantling: 50%
After lunch our numbers increased as the kids wanted to see what we were up to.

Assembly

Next day a few of us pottered around on the farm and started assembly, we’ve been paranoid about people coming on site finding a load of aluminium and stealing it for scrap (it’s happened before).
Quite quickly we managed to get the main frame put up.
Should probably have removed this stump before starting assembly – however as stumps go it wasn’t too bad to pull out with the farm jack.
James busy installing the polycarbonate panels – we were goign to replace some of them but after a quick price check decided for now just to carry on with installing what we had – they’re not cheap!

Is it a greenhouse though?

When you say greenhouse I think glass, well it doesn’t have glass it has polycarbonate panels, and it’s shape is more tunnel like than a traditional greenhouse, so is it a polytunnel or a greenhouse. I think we’ll just call it the big greenhouse.