The Fat Lady Sings!

By "Fat Lady," I don't mean me, so Shaddup, All of Youse. Although I'd definitely like to break out into song. I'm sure you're familiar with the saying "It ain't over until the fat lady sings."

The greenhouse is built, and the new front garden beds and hardscape are finished (except for all that planting, of course). The greenhouse arrived on Wednesday, Jan. 22, and the contractor showed up the very next day to start building it.

I really thought the truck from Charley's Greenhouse would be bigger. But a single pickup was all they needed.

The foundation is in, at the end of the first day. Each of those wooden beams is cemented into the ground.

The new view from my living room window.

By Day Three, they've started to install the twin-wall windows

The finished greenhouse floor

To at least one reader of my blog, that brick and broken concrete pattern should look familiar. It was shamelessly copied from Nell Jean, who writes two blogs, Dotty Plants Greenhouse Journal and Secrets of a Seed Scatterer. Except for the letters A(Alison) and N(Nigel), it's very similar to a pattern in her greenhouse floor, which she wrote about here. Her pattern was itself inspired by an article and photo in the LA Times, here. The contractor came up with the idea of putting our initials into it.

The concrete welcome mat with my mosaic pattern, which you can read about in a previous post here.

I'm absolutely thrilled that it's over, and I can start planting in earnest. You may remember, the work on the new front garden began back in early December, right after Thanksgiving, and continued through the Deep Freeze that we had those first couple of weeks. There was a break for Christmas and New Year's and for the first half of January, and then about three weeks ago the greenhouse arrived and the contractor came back.

I was intrigued on Sunday, Feb. 2, when I went out for a potter around the garden, to see that the automatic vents on the south-facing slope of the roof and on the side had done their thing as advertised and opened to vent warm air from the greenhouse. The temperature outside was in the low 40s, but I didn't have a thermometer inside yet to let me know what temp it needs to reach before the vents open. the vents are adjustable.

Automatically opened vent

Not quite as wide open, but then it's probably cooler down low

If you're a friend of mine on Facebook, then you probably know that there have been quite a number of hiccups in the construction of this greenhouse. I'm not going to go into them in detail here, but if you're living in the Seattle/Tacoma area and you're thinking of having a greenhouse built, feel free to email me with any questions. You can get my email address from my profile.

Voila! The finished greenhouse!

View from the front door

It's great to have someone to do the heavy work, but it's also stressful for me to have two or three men in big boots here from about 8:30 a.m. till 4 or sometimes 5 p.m. every weekday, knocking on the door to ask me questions or to make decisions about something, or to very occasionally use the bathroom. For me, who's used to being alone all day while Nigel is at work, it's unsettling and the very opposite of peaceful.

Finally. The men in big boots are gone, and peace reigns. Briefly.

I plan to start singing arias and flinging dirt around and planting tomorrow.