Sand in a Sauna

Sep 1

Hey friends, welcome to The Grid Is For Squares. It feels like about a million years since our last episode, but (checks notes) nope, still just 2 weeks.

We’re posting this episode exactly 1 year from the very first time we set foot on our property! Not when we bought it, but the first time we checked the place out. It was 100 degrees that day, which turns out is… very normal for this time of year. ☀️

Today’s big story is that we recently went up to the property to finish (well, “finish”) the greenhouse! We left on a Thursday after Vince got home from work and arrived in the dark, then we woke up ass-early on the prop and got to work. First we moved all of the furniture out of the greenhouse, then we installed our 4 aluminum boxes to provide ventilation.

After that, Vince started making trips to Ace Hardware to pick up bags of sand while Amy laid 2 spirals of vinyl tubing for the future in-floor heating and cooling system. Amy may not be a plumber yet, but she’s certainly earning her landscaper badge! After all the tubing was laid, we covered it in a few more inches of sand. And finally, we laid down 3 bamboo mats with precise holes cut out for the drain and the ventilation boxes.

It was very hot. And very dirty. And since we were moving all that sand and creating a lot of dust, we wore our cloth Covid masks for most of the day.

But the greenhouse now has a real floor! No more nighttime crawly critters! It would almost be a proper indoor space… you know, if only it wasn’t 130 degrees.

We still need to finish the bricks for the outside and caulk all the joints before the rain begins, and Ace Hardware didn’t stock our last 15 bags of sand in time, so we’ll need to Finish-Finish later. I’m starting to sense that no project on the property will ever truly be completed, but I guess that’s how it goes.

We also cleared some brush, did some more flagging and site marking for the yurt, and Vince spotted a 5-foot rattlesnake! First rattlesnake we’ve seen on the property, but not surprising. Living in harmony with nature is part of the point of this place, so we left Snake Friend alone.

WHAT WE BUILT:

The finished greenhouse floor contains the following layers:

Sand. A LOT of sand.
Vinyl tubing for in-floor heating/cooling. (Not Pex, the in-floor heating standard, but food-grade vinyl tubing. This is just an experiment and we’ll use Pex when we eventually get to our actual house.) We used landscape staples to hold the spiral down until we covered it in sand to lock it in place.
More sand.