...bow, which is connected to the purlins, the roof braces, the other bows by way of the purlins, etc.
So getting the posts to be VERTICAL meant loosening a lot of the screws that had been accidentally tightened too much in putting up the side purlins Saturday.
But by the end of a couple hours, we had all the hip boards up. These are the 2 x 8 boards at the top of the walls, to which many things will attach: pulley system and winches for the drop curtains, retaining cords to keep the curtains from billowing, gutters, and eventually the c-channels that will hold on the 2-layer plastic cover.
The instructions for the greenhouse say in bold type at the top: WARNING! Use of AQC ["treated"] lumber will void the warrantee on the greenhouse film ["plastic"]. So we bought beautiful Western cedar boards for 3 times the cost of regular treated lumber. THEN a last glance over the section on hipboard placement brought to light an inconspicuous note that mentions as an aside that treated lumber can be used for the hip boards...sigh.
I have to say that the cedar was wonderful to work with--much lighter to handle than treated would have been, and probably straighter and less knotty. And smells good. And more environmentally benign.
A couple tricks really made this task go smoothly. One was to start by cutting the 2 x 4s that will serve as nailers on the corner posts, fitting between the base board and the hip board. These gave us our standard measurement for placing the hip boards...we tied them onto the posts we were going to attach a hip board to, and then they held the hip board at just the right height while we attached it.
For posts that needed to be adjusted to be plumb, I leaned a long 2 x 6 against the side the post was leaning towards, with the other end resting on the ground near the baseboard, wherever it ended up. Then I pushed a piece of re-bar into the ground at the end of the 2 x 6 to keep it from sliding along the ground. Leaning or hammering on the 2 x 6 easily pushed the post into adjustment and then held it there while we fastened. BUT--first we had to make sure the purlin wasn't attached too tightly, or it would prevent the bow from moving into proper position. One of our last tasks will be tightening EVERYTHING.
Pictures would be a nice touch, wouldn't they? But for a construction project like this one photo just doesn't seem to cut it, and multiple photos won't load, and even loading one photo is terribly tedious. I need a computer person to figure out a system for this and teach me! Or better yet, just DO it for me!
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2 comments:
Resizing the photos helps - don't know what sort of photo software came with your camera and/or computer, but most if not all of them let you change the sizes, to make them smaller (using less bytes). Then, they load easier...
Best I can offer from this distance ;)
Update, 2015: The down side of the soft cedar hip boards is that the screws attaching the c-channel have eventually woggled out their holes through wind stress, and the c-channels are coming loose. The solution is to unfasten the plastic cover and through-bolt the c-channel using fender washers on the inside of the hip boards, as well as under the bolt heads within the channel (aluminum is soft, too). Machine screws with round heads protect the plastic within the channel; the wiggle wires flex around them.
Any other form of plastic attachment would probably have an even shorter failure time with the cedar hip boards.
Perhaps this would be less a problem if we had continued to inflate the cover. We ceased inflation after beginning the practice of annually removing the cover in order to gather natural rainfall. When reinstalling plastic, it was extremely difficult to get the fan mount lined up with the existing hole in the plastic. To successfully integrate the inflator blower with the periodic removal/replacement of the cover, we would need to have the motor mounted separate from the cover, with a detachable hose to the cover. A future project.
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