They’ve landed!

If anyone was watching through our back gate today, they would have seen aliens at work in the rain.
The pair of us were very colourful as we donned not only our yellows, but pink rubber gloves and blue plastic booties over our shoes as we wanted to get the greenhouse issue sorted today.
The weather was teasing us, pretending to be sunny and secretly drizzling on us, but our determination to finish the job wasn’t diminished.
The bottom of the garden is a quagmire. We have clay soil here and drainage is not good. To be honest, I cannot remember the back lawn ever being so saturated. Each step produced its own mini pool and the mud just sucked at our feet.

Hubby had put the panes in on the sides yesterday before rain and the cold stopped play.
I couldn’t help very much as I must have twisted awkwardly lifting the frame the previous day and my back was playing me up.
Not so today. There was no way he could manage to do the roof on his own, so after walking the dog, we set to.

Shit.

The first two panes went in and nothing lined up, having a gap at one end and overlap at the other. This was ridiculous as we had been so careful to make sure the base was level on all sides. Besides, if  the frame had been twisted, the sides wouldn’t have slotted in properly.
It was too heavy to consider tweaking the sides, so we came in for a cup of tea and discussion.
It had to be the roof.
Perhaps we’d tightened the nuts too early and needed wriggle room to line things up. This made a lot of sense, so our hands a bit warmer, we donned the gear and went back outside.

Success, and the first six panels went in OK. There is a window in the roof, but we discovered we had this on the wrong side as the rubber had been cut to fit, so we had to take the window unit out, and the pane below it, turn it round and put it in the other side.
Counting all the remaining support clips, we discovered we were one missing. That too didn’t make any sense, but sure enough we were one down.
Enter a rice pudding can to save the day and Hubby made two clips, putting those in place of one taking little weight and re-siting that elsewhere.
This is what our fixings looked like!

We put the second to last pane in and it started to rain. We were so close to finishing so we pressed on and completed the roof. Hurrah!

True to form and having cold hands, nuts, bolts and clips weren’t being kind when we came to mount the door. We ended up taking the tracking off and working backwards, and while Hubby was finishing that off, I counted the number of glass pane clips we had left over as we should have used them all.
Ten left, so I went round to check and discovered where they had been missed. Armed with pliers, I pointed and Hubby pinned.
We finished at 5 pm, so had been working all day bar a break for ‘roof solving’ tea and lunch.
Thus, we have come from this last week
to this (photo taken 5.30 pm in the rain):
It does look very shaded, but when I was inside holding panes and the sun was shining, I was cooking!

Now, where did I put those tomato and bean seeds?

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