Post by H2O on Jan 28, 2014 19:54:49 GMT -5
Hey Everyone,
Some of you have probably noticed I've been popping in rather sporadically since September and I thought I would share why! Today is my first real day off that I've had some time to go through some pictures to upload.
For those that don't already know I work at a butterfly garden in Victoria. Our greenhouse is over 20 year old and over time our roof has been deteriorating, so this fall we replaced the entire roof! So during this entire project I (and everyone else) worked ended up working 7 days a week more weeks and 10-12 hour days were a common thing. Needless to say I didn't have time to do much else. Since we reopened in December it has been major work trying to get the gardens back to normal. I'll try to let the pictures speak for themselves but I'll explain them a little.
The first set of pictures is going to be mainly pictures of the roof (I know its a little boring) but I'll be adding pictures of other stuff as time goes by!
So to start, we had to catch every single animal in the gardens. Flamingo's - easy, Tortoise - easy, Fish - easy, Indian Ringnecks - Not so easy! and Zebra finches - Damn near impossible!
We also had to prune everything that was near the roof, this process took all summer do to.
Before
After
i882.photobucket.com/albums/ac29/justininwonderland/photo3-2.jpg
This is what a Monstera should look like. Think about that the next time you see one at Home Depot!
To get an idea this is what the roof looked like before- Note that it is made of wood.... and this is a humid tropical garden. Not the great feat of engineering.
Then the roof came off, which is not as easy as you might think.
No roof!
As you could imagine, the temperatures in Victoria aren't quite tropical in mid September so we had to cover the gardens in 6mil poly. After this project I never want to see poly again.
To keep from boring you guys too much I skipped a bunch of steps on the new materials used. No wood though
Then the frames went back in and the new coroplast. Originally the roof had 8mm laminated glass. Each pane was about 100lbs (removing hundreds and hundreds of them was one of the worst projects I've ever done) but the new coroplast only weigh 4-5lbs! It's pretty awesome stuff. The new beams are pretty sexy compared to the old ones!
We also got a brand new lighting system. Before we had 12 1000W HPS 6 400W MH and 24 double fixture 8foot T12s. Now we have 36 4foot double fixture T5HO and those alone are brighter then the entire old system. This is at night with the foggers going full blast.
After all was said and done we got to release all the animals back into the gardens.
Some of you have probably noticed I've been popping in rather sporadically since September and I thought I would share why! Today is my first real day off that I've had some time to go through some pictures to upload.
For those that don't already know I work at a butterfly garden in Victoria. Our greenhouse is over 20 year old and over time our roof has been deteriorating, so this fall we replaced the entire roof! So during this entire project I (and everyone else) worked ended up working 7 days a week more weeks and 10-12 hour days were a common thing. Needless to say I didn't have time to do much else. Since we reopened in December it has been major work trying to get the gardens back to normal. I'll try to let the pictures speak for themselves but I'll explain them a little.
The first set of pictures is going to be mainly pictures of the roof (I know its a little boring) but I'll be adding pictures of other stuff as time goes by!
So to start, we had to catch every single animal in the gardens. Flamingo's - easy, Tortoise - easy, Fish - easy, Indian Ringnecks - Not so easy! and Zebra finches - Damn near impossible!
We also had to prune everything that was near the roof, this process took all summer do to.
Before
After
i882.photobucket.com/albums/ac29/justininwonderland/photo3-2.jpg
This is what a Monstera should look like. Think about that the next time you see one at Home Depot!
To get an idea this is what the roof looked like before- Note that it is made of wood.... and this is a humid tropical garden. Not the great feat of engineering.
Then the roof came off, which is not as easy as you might think.
No roof!
As you could imagine, the temperatures in Victoria aren't quite tropical in mid September so we had to cover the gardens in 6mil poly. After this project I never want to see poly again.
To keep from boring you guys too much I skipped a bunch of steps on the new materials used. No wood though
Then the frames went back in and the new coroplast. Originally the roof had 8mm laminated glass. Each pane was about 100lbs (removing hundreds and hundreds of them was one of the worst projects I've ever done) but the new coroplast only weigh 4-5lbs! It's pretty awesome stuff. The new beams are pretty sexy compared to the old ones!
We also got a brand new lighting system. Before we had 12 1000W HPS 6 400W MH and 24 double fixture 8foot T12s. Now we have 36 4foot double fixture T5HO and those alone are brighter then the entire old system. This is at night with the foggers going full blast.
After all was said and done we got to release all the animals back into the gardens.