We’ve been spending a lot of time working on a fun project outside our home. Bet you can’t guess what it is…I’ll give you a hint. It’s the title of this post.

Yep, we built a greenhouse. I have had plans to do this since moving into our home. And this year, I decided it was going to happen. I would like I nice, permanent, engineered structures, but I realized the time and cost meant it might never happen. So we built it inexpensively and built it to fit the site to save time.

It’s 1 inch PVC. To attach it to the house, we screwed 2×4’s on the home and drilled large holes in the 2×4 for the PVC to lock into. The bottom is on top of rebar that is pounded into the ground. We framed it up and used white felt over the PVC, and then put the plastic film over the frame. The plastic frame is connected by snap clamps on the bottom, and sandwiched between two pieces of wood on the top. (Clamps, felt and film were bought from here.)

Anyway, super simple, it cost right around $300, and took around 15-20 hours to build.

Someone asked me recently what I was going to plant in the greenhouse. And I didn’t have an answer for them. (I am a horrible horticulturist, I sometimes overlook the plant part.) We built a greenhouse to plant plants in right? Kind of. We also built it to contribute to the passive solar heating of our home. The wall it is built against is under-insulated, with leaky windows. And rather than upgrading any of that, we built a greenhouse instead. We’ll see how it works this winter. And I will get around to planting some plants in there too.