Latest walkthrough of the greenhouse systems.
May 14th Update: Electrical and Grow Beds
We’ve been super busy with our kiddo turning 6 months old and other spring things that needed to be done. That said, I wanted to briefly share an update on how the project is coming along.
Read moreGreenhouse Flooring
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.
Read moreProject Roadmap
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.
Read More…Catching Up – Spring 2019
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.
Read More…Roofing a Geodesic Dome Greenhouse
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.
Read More…Preparing to Roof the Dome
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.
- finish backfilling
- install a small skirt section of roof to cover the dome/building connections
- sheet the north side of the dome and seal the joints before we can shingle.
Building a Geodesic Dome
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.
Read More…Utilities and Backfilling the Foundation
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.
Read More…On to the Second Floor
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.
Read moreTime to Start Digging
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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