On my travels, I met a guy who had just built his own greenhouse. It had taken him two years! We got talking and I mentioned my Greenhouse web site. He could hardly wait for me to finish my sentence before launching into his tale:

"Building a greenhouse is one of the most frustrating projects that I have ever undertaken. I have been involved in doing home repair kinds of things for years, so I am no stranger to the difficulty of making everything fit together, but I swear, I will never build a greenhouse again. I had honestly thought that building a greenhouse would be just like building a shed. Just assemble the frame and install the walls and, bingo – all done. Boy was I mistaken. I had no problem when I made my shed, but the greenhouse was a real nightmare.

D.I.Y. Fundamentalism is a Form of Mentalism. "I should have listened to my friends who said that I should hire an outside contractor instead of building a greenhouse myself, but I was sure that I was up to it. Let me tell you, it was one nightmare after another. Think installing windows is a pain in the neck? Try building a greenhouse, where every wall is made of absolutely nothing but windows and window frames! But that is not even the half of it. Oh no, not by a long shot.

"If you are building a garage or a shed, you have some leniency in terms of how things fit together. Sure, you assemble the basic frame as accurately and precisely as you can, but a millimeter here, half an inch there, and you're still good. But it's not the case if you are building a greenhouse. Not the case at all. Imagine assembling your whole frame and finding that your window frames don't fit. Imagine trying to recut them,- an expensive waste of time and money that does nothing at all to fix the problem - and then having to dig out your foundations and start again. Imagine burning it down for the insurance and calling it a day. Such is the nightmare of building a greenhouse from scratch. Never again, my friend. Never again.

Plant Lovers Unite and Take Over. "I had always thought that building a greenhouse was the ultimate project for a plant lover. It's sort of like decorating the nursery for your kid. It's the process of making a safe place for something that you love and treasure to glow and blossom. Now I realize the horrible truth. Building a greenhouse did just the opposite for me. It was six months before I could look at a plant!

"But now a year has gone by. I've begun to wander in and out of my greenhouse. After all the trials and tribulations, I have to admit that I now have something that I'd been wanting for a long time. It's still standing, and it is no longer empty. Not by a long way."

Telling his story put this guy in a much better mood, and we yabbered on long into the night. But I couldn't help wondering if building a greenhouse could really be so difficult. I'd never even considered the possibility of designing and building one from scratch. There are simply too many good kits that are easy to buy off the shelf, take home, assemble and admire through the glass of a tart Chardonnay to worry about the whole D.I.Y.extremo thing.

Cheers.