Zen and the art of Greenhouse maintenance

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We’re lucky, we have 2 greenhouses.

The first greenhouse is at the allotment and is your normal aluminium and glass construction with a sliding door. It’s a little on the rickety side but in good nick and very useful. This year has been unique in that it’s the first year that I haven’t lost any glass in it due to strong winds (touch wood for the rest of the year). Last year the wind managed to not only blow out 15 panes of glass but also rip the door off as well as moving the frame of the window! The big problem is replacing the glass that gets broken, there aren’t any glaziers where I live (at least not dependable ones) so I end up driving to a very good place in Harrogate or picking some up after work if I’m trying to save time.

The second greenhouse is a plastic one at home. We chose plastic because it’s next to a stone/dirt track and we didn’t want flying stones to break panes of glass. It’s a strange construction of an aluminium frame with regular interlocking plastic panes that slide into the frame. Very light, very warm and very easy to put up. And yes it’s bolted down onto a concrete base. This greenhouse has a normal style door that opens on canvass hinges, one at the bottom on the inside and 5 frame recessed hinges on the outside.

About a week after we put the greenhouse up, mrs muddy_knees managed to rip one of the outside hinges. This caused the door to drop occasionally, but was nothing that we couldn’t cope with, and as is usually the case we lived with it, we let it go and did nothing about it. Time passes. Three years later and I realise that the hinge on the inside has perished considerably, and now 4 of the 5 hinges on the outside have split as well. This means that the door is more or less hanging off! The problem is that it’s not of the sort of construction that allows for replacements to be added. So brain power was put in place.

What can you use to fix hinges? What do we have in the garage? Hmm, how about cushion flooring? We have some left over so lets see what we can do, it certainly can’t harm any.

What follows is 40 minutes of fun with cushion flooring, a Stanley knife, epoxy resin and a screwdriver. I will for the sake of the tender or easily offended out there emit probably a good 50% of the words that were said. It is however a proven fact that swearing at things when doing DIY does make them better. Let’s say 10p a swear.

To replace the inner hinge I attached a piece of lino on to the non-door side of the frame and after it had stuck I drilled and screwed a number of small screws in to hold it firmly in place. The problem came with the second side of the hinge, it was then that I found out about the slightly springy nature of cushion flooring, and the fact that I had to press quite hard onto a door that kept slipping out of it’s frame, to try and set the epoxy resin in place. After about £7.90 in the swear box and about 5 minutes it had stuck enough for me to drill and fix the second side of the hinge. Hurrah.

The outer hinges were easier (thankfully). These simple involved prising open the aluminium frame enough to slide the old hinge section out and then apply epoxy resin to both edges of the makeshift hinge, insert the new hinge into one side of the frame and then try to get this done on the other side of the frame in 3 places up and down the door. This probably cost me another £2 (so we’ll say £10 overall).

In the end I had hinges in all the places I wanted hinges, with the added benefit of the hinge being slightly springy so it does shut a bit better than before. Of course only time will tell of the effects of epoxy resin on cushion flooring in an aluminium framed greenhouse, but we’ll see what happens. At least for now the door is safe.

I also had to soak the stanley knife, the screwdriver and my hands in warm soapy water to get the epoxy resin off. Oh well, at least my hands are now nice and soft!

Please note I did take a photo but it is so indescribably boring that I won’t bother to put it in, you can’t tell much from the photo anyway.

• 8 May, 2009
• 8 likes

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