It’s been a few more weeks since my last update and I’ve been super busy learning some plumbing and figuring out the best configuration for all the water treatment steps. We’ve got the water flowing and I’m super stoked to go over the details. This was a lot of fun to figure out.
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It’s taken a few weeks working several hours every day after work, but we’re finished with grow bed construction. I’m sure these are super over engineered, but better safe that sorry for this much water.
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The one thing that’s been holding up the rest of the work on the greenhouse is finishing the floors. The top floor is just osb subfloor and downstairs is treated plywood. I spent a long time trying to find a product like vinyl tiles or paneling of some sort, but always ran into the same issue. There are very few products out there that will survive large temperature swings.
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Now that we’re all caught up here and the weather is getting nicer, we’re looking to get back up to speed with the project. Here’s the roadmap for the next couple months.
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We survived the winter with flying colors! We have almost 3 feet of snow in the backyard, but the dome was awesome at shedding any snow accumulation. Everything remained water tight and we didn’t have any issues.
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Since we are planning to try to make this a year around greenhouse in a colder climate, we’re going to install two types of roof system. A standard roof on the north side and corrugated polycarbonate on the south side. This allows us to insulate the north side where we don’t get much sun and it saves us money because polycarbonate is not cheap.
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Now that we have the structure up and solid, we have a few things to do before we can install the traditional roof and polycarbonate.
With the lower building mostly complete and the backfilling well underway, we can finally start assembling the the dome structure. While we were confident that we could pull of this build, we were a bit apprehensive going into it considering our first dome failure. We were comforted by the fact that we could make the necessary adjustments with our piped hubs if we ran into a a similar situation this time around.
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Before we start on the dome, we need to get some other things squared away first. We want to finish running our utilities so we can backfill. This will make the dome construction a lot easier when we can work from the outside on solid ground.
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Now that we have the bottom floor in and the walls leveled, the top floor framing moved along fairly quick. Normally we’d install floor joists on top of the lower floor walls, but we wanted to make sure we were bracing the walls properly and we didn’t feel like trying to install rim joists on a 15 sided building.
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Now that we have a level base, we can start putting up walls. When I was drawing up the plans for the building I just made it look nice, I didn’t pay much attention to things like standard lumber sizes.
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Hurray for Spring! The ground is still a little soft, but we decided to get started anyways. We had a local excavator come out to dig our utility trench and the circular foundation.
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When we first started planning this project we researched a few techniques for constructing the dome hubs. We had several factors to consider when deciding on a building technique such as snow load, which would be best for a permanent structure, ease of construction, and cost.
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