Earthworks

I think everyone can relate to the experience of seeing something done badly or wrong, and wanting desperately to fix it. For me, it's all the little things people do wrong when building or renovating. I don't have construction experience, but I have a B.Arch and five years of experience working at architecture firms, so I know a little bit about how things are supposed to be built even if I don't know exactly how to do it. As an example, everyone who has rented probably has experience with the "floor tiles used places other than the floor" phenomenon. The last apartment I lived in had the same tile on the bathroom floor, shower surround, kitchen floor, kitchen counters, and backsplash. I think it's to save money and time, since floor tiles are large so you don't spend as much time grouting, and you can just buy one kind of tile, but it's ugly (little ceramic tiles are so much prettier and neater looking than big stoneware slabs) and gross (I don't want to be put in mind of my bathroom floor while chopping food on my kitchen counter) and lazy. This practice is common, in fact my current place has the same tiles on kitchen floor and counter, but that makes it no less maddening for someone like me who cares about that sort of thing. But I didn't start writing to complain about tiles, I wanted to complain about our greenhouse. I can tell that the greenhouse has many fatal flaws. Sometimes I wish the builder had spent a little less time carving pentagrams and a little more time researching siting and drainage. In any case, the greenhouse's days are numbered, but I am doing a few things to extend its life as much as possible by concentrating on the three main drainage issues.

For example, the building has a concrete slab foundation, which is very nice and sturdy and all those good things, but it needs a drain. In a greenhouse, one is often watering the plants, which means there is often water on the floor - which, when a floor has no drain, runs to the low spots and pools there. These low spots happen to be in the northwest and northeast corners right next to the wall, so you can imagine what those are like.

Here's another problem. There were narrow raised garden beds edged with a row of large stones along the east and north walls. However, these were created by mounding up the soil right onto the plywood cladding. They stapled a strip of black plastic against the wall, but it didn't help to prevent rot. Generally what you want to do is keep the level of the soil below the top of the foundation, so that the soil is only in contact with concrete, stone, or brick. Anyway, these raised beds were not made correctly, and they were also planted with English ivy which our landlord has tasked us with removing, so I have been digging up the roots and spreading the soil out flat.

This leads me to the third problem. In general, when a structure is built you want the ground sloping gently away from the foundation on all sides. Thus, rainwater drains away from the foundation instead of pooling around it. Well, unfortunately there is a slight rise to the northwest of the greenhouse, and all the rainwater from there is trapped next to the wall with no way to flow around the building and continue on down the slope. So I have been attempting to regrade the earth in the area. Here's a little plan diagram to try to explain what I'm doing. The red arrow is the greenhouse, the green things are trees (the little green circles are stumps), and the brown and blue lines show what I'd like the topography to be like and how I hope the water will flow.