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army surplus greenhouse
Tuesday, August 4 2009
Back in the spring, I'd bought a gallon of an olive drab semi-gloss acrylic paint for use in making the greenhouse roof less-reflective. The hope was to make the neighbors to the north happier; they'd complained about the blinding glare from the galvanized metal. Painting the roof had required less than a third of that gallon of paint, so I've been using it for painting other surfaces. It's a hardy paint that seems to be self-priming, so I've used it on exposed lumber on the outside of the greenhouse, particularly the door and the two by six framing around the roof. Because of all the olive drab, the greenhouse is beginning to look like I might have bought it at an army surplus depot.
Today I started painting the small pieces of lumber around the large panes of south-facing glass. In the winter, this glass produced enormous amounts of condensation (and even some frost), and the non-pressure-treated wood nearby was often spotted with mold. Hopefully if I seal the wood beneath a few layers of paint, it will shed this moisture next winter. I'm perfectly happy with the condensation rolling off the panes of glass, across the painted wood surfaces, and draining down across the masonry below to the bedrock. Of course, if the paint doesn't manage to protect the wood, I can always rip them out and replace them with materials less fond of rotting; half of these pieces aren't actually fastened to anything and are simply held in place by the weight of the glass. You can see three of these pieces in the following photograph. (Note that the horizontal plank underneath the glass is a pressure-treated two by six, and I'm not worried about it rotting.)
I've been working on my database visualization system more lately, adding support for switching between viewing several different databases on one server. I've also been refactoring the way some of the HTML is generated, forcing the functional parts of an HTML table to be generated by a set of functions instead of specifying the tags in separate places throughout the code. Down the road, this will allow me to fundamentally change the way data is presented; I could use an all CSS-method or perhaps even do it entirely in Flash.
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