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Hello my dear!
It might look like working on our Master bedroom renovations we had neglected our garden. Well, not really! We have been so busy working on a few projects in our house, and I now super excited to share one of them with you! It is our backyard shed to greenhouse conversion!
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It is one of those projects that you sometime might be overthinking. What I mean is that we have always wanted to be able to garden year-round considering the relatively mild winters we get here in the Lower Mainland. Some winters may get colder than usual, like the last one, but still it is usually not colder than -15° C (5 F). Also, when it gets that cold, it is usually sunny, which can be helpful 🙂 So, besides growing microgreens inside the house in winter, we thought it would be great to have a greenhouse to grow cold-hardy veggies in. It can also be helpful to grow very tender fruit like cantaloupe inside it in summer (as they may get rainy and cool).
Do you agree it is such a great idea?
Please say you do!
Now, our backyard is not big, and it is pretty shady in winter because of the trees and neighbouring houses. So, the only possible location would be on the south side of the property right where our old garden shed is located. First, we thought we would move the shed into another area, as we still wanted to keep it for storage of all the gardening equipment. We were trying to figure out the ways how to do that, until one day my husband just said that it seems like we were making our lives more complicated then they are supposed to be. “Why don’t we just transform our shed into the greenhouse?” he asked.
Sounds Simple?
Well, we had realized it would not be a simple project, but it still looked much easier for us rather than having to build a new greenhouse.
So here is what you will need:
- greenhouse plastic (we used regular 6 mil 20′ wide construction plastic from Home Hardware)
- measuring tape
- duck tape or gorilla tape
- utility knife
- lumber (we had leftover 1x3x6 which my husband cut into three 1x1x6 pieces) to secure the plastic to the wood frame
- saw to cut the lumber
- staple gun
So, let’s get started!
You will need to measure the walls and the roof’s width and length and cut the plastic as needed. Since our plastic was 20′ (6 m), we just cut 1 length of the roof, and 1 height (x2) of the walls. We had connected the walls parts plastic at the back of the shed.
Remove the old roofing material. Ours used to have very old cedar shingles covered with lots of pine needles from the pine tree besides the shed. The roof was leaking and so old that we had earth worms and other usually-living-in-the-ground creatures there.
And of course nothing can be done without this little helper!
Re-use and repurpose
Because the shingles were almost rotten, we decided to use them as a base layer between the raised beds, instead of taking them to the dump station (and paying for that). That way we would be able to keep some of the unwanted weeds under control. (and yes, we do believe there are some good-and-wanted weeds too :))
We have now covered them with woodchips to create nice and clean walkways. Stay tuned for our garden update.
Back to the shed
We had covered the roof with plastic and secured it underneath the roof frame with lumber.
After the roof was done, we removed the siding. We kept the wood corners parts to re-use them with plastic. We had just cut the plastic long enough to kinda “hug” the perimeter of the structure. As I had mentioned above, the width of the plastic was not enough to cover the whole perimeter, so we connected two parts of them at the back.
We used a tape in the corners to prevent a ware-off of the plastic and reused the old wood corners.
And added the old siding at the bottom to both make it look nicer and to secure the plastic to the frame.
We have left the upper part of the greenhouse open on two opposite sides for ventilation during the summer. It can get really hot inside when it is sunny. We will be adding plastic there later in fall. We have also decided to keep the door with siding for now. But we are planning on building a new door with plastic later in fall too.
At this moment we are using it for our seedlings. They grow great there! We will be building raised beds there soon.
So here we have it.
Our shed to greenhouse conversion project Part 1 is done!
It took us a weekend to complete it. However, I took the after picture last week . You can see our lilac tree all green on the right side 🙂
If you are planning on building a new hoop house, I am highly recommending checking on Patrick @OneYardRevolution. He is one of my favourite sources for gardening ideas, tips and inspiration.
Did you have any projects that you were ‘overthinking’ until you got a completely different idea for it? How did it turn out? Please share in the comments below.
I really like this but I am curious, you don’t get critters inside since the top front is wide open? I would think that squirrels and mice could climb up the door and have a feast (eeek!).
Hi Karen! We did cover the upper part since I wrote the post. We do get bees and other insects in the greenhouse but we haven’t had any problems with other creatures there. We occasionally get raccoons in the garden but they like our cherry trees more than the eggplants in the greenhouse 🙂 Do you have any tips for how to kindly unteach them from visiting and feasting on our cherries?