Great excitement!

Oh yes indeedy!

when we first moved in

First, though, let me take you on a little trip back down memory lane.....

some much needed support going on!

walls lovingly painted by Adrian LOL

.....by now I'm sure you can guess why I've been so excited 😵

Ta-daaa!  

Yup, I am now the very proud owner of a fab new greenhouse 😍

The lovely Kenny of Hutchison Windows came out to give us a quote, and we ordered said greenhouse last July.  We knew that Kenny wouldn't be able to start work until at least October.....

.....which was fine.  But October came and went because we then hit the winter weather, which put poor Kenny right back with all his orders.  In the end, it was finally built in March.  As I'm sure you can imagine, I was (and still am!) a very happy bunny!

I already had the potting bench (it came with us from our old house), which I painted a couple of years back with Annie Sloan chalk paint in Primer Red.  You may have noticed that the greenhouse door isn't full height.  This is due to being restricted on the maximum roof height because the block wall is only as tall as the original stone wall behind it.  This made it a tad difficult to get the potting bench into the greenhouse ~ once we had tipped it on its side to get through the door, there wasn't enough room to swing the bloody thing back up again!  The solution, of course, was to take the top shelf section off.....which had we thought of doing before we moved it out of the garden shed, would have made the whole thing a damn sight less heavy to cart down to its new home!  And to make matters worse, it wasn't until we had got the bench into the greenhouse that we remembered the shelf in the lower section was removeable, too 😃

It was a bit of a pallaver to take the top self section off because before I painted it, Adrian added strips of wood to make a back-board as it was just open originally.  When we put it all back together again we decided that although it would fit against the wall at it's original height, it would in fact look better being slightly lower, so Adrian shorted the whole of the upper back section.   

Once the potting bench was finally in place, we then had to see about greenhouse staging.  Naturally, we couldn't get anything readymade to make maximum use of the space available 😕  In the end, we got the staging made-to-measure by a chap here who recycles wood to make garden benches, planters, etc.

Scott put it all together whilst we were away south a couple of months back. 

I now have lots of storage space beneath the staging.  The only pots I can't fit in are the really big ones so they are being kept in the garden shed ~ plenty of space in there now that I no longer have to use it as a potting shed 😉

I buy the compost 10 or 12 bags at a time and have them delivered from Wellpark Garden Centre over in Kirkwall.  Most of them sit on a pallet up near our compost bins and I now store a couple at a time in the greenhouse ready for me to use.  I use our home-made compost to replenish the soil in our raised kitchen garden beds and to add to the borders, too.

I put an outdoor rug down to make the concrete floor a bit softer underfoot.  All my pots sit in large plastic gravel trays so that when they are watered the floor and lower shelves don't get wet.  The little stool belonged to my Grandma ~ I think it may originally have been a kitchen chair; I crocheted the cover a number of years ago. 

Despite my natural somewhat chaotic personality, I'm keeping the greenhouse neat and tidy 😄

All these vintage bottles were dug up in the back garden!

As you can see, it can get pretty warm in there 😲

As this has been such a photo-heavy post, I'll leave it here and show you what I've been growing another time!