Saturday, November 22, 2008

It's Going to Be a Greenhouse!

Jim and I have had this project in the plans for quite a while now, and it's finally coming together. We're adding on an eight by sixteen foot addition to the south side of the house to be a combination greenhouse, sunroom, solar heat collector. Since we don't have a lot of building experience, there's a lot of time spent just planning, reading and studying options, and talking over what we really want from this space. It has taken several months to actually get something started, but Jim has kept drawing and redrawing plans, and it's finally happening.

Our goal here is to have a place to collect solar heat during the daytime and vent it into the house to help out with winter heating bills. We'd also like to use it as a solar room in the winter time as a place to sit in the light and help fight the winter blues, and also to extend the growing season here in Northern Indiana. If we could harvest some winter veggies, or salad greens, it would be wonderful too, but we're not sure just what to expect. Anyway, it's very much a work in progress, but here are some pictures so far, and it's just wonderful to be able to see this much happening at this point. Hopefully we'll have the roof framed in by the end of the week and be able to at least drape it in plastic this winter for some solar heat gain.

The pictures, in order, show: the footers laid out with Jim fastening the last of the rebar to reenforce the foundation, Cement truck delivering the wet cement, Jim adding bolts to the wet footers to bolt the sill plates onto, fitting sill plate boards into place, side wall framing and door framing up and Jim leveling the door frame out.










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