hey guys retired at 40 Spring has officially sprung stuffs turning green
but it's still a little bit too early to plant most things here in zone 5 so I
have been using this greenhouse for the last couple months and its really been
doing well but it's real real expensive it's about twenty five hundred dollars
so I thought to myself there's got to be a better way that you can make a
geodesic dome greenhouse for much much less so I thought about it for quite a
while and I was trying to figure out how to make the circle base and how to make
that sturdy enough to support something that would have big arches going over
the top so I think I've got the solution and it was staring me right in the face
the trampoline so we've had this beat down trampoline for lots and lots of
years and it's starting to get pretty crunchy so you can find these just about
anywhere they're all over Craigslist people getting rid of them Facebook
classifieds I'm sure you can find one in a junkyard so the first thing I'm going
to do is tear it all apart and then I'm going to show you how we're gonna
convert this into this so my biggest goals for building this because I want
to keep the cost down obviously if you've seen my other hoop house video
it's kind of a just a traditional hoop house I was able to build that for about
150 dollars and I'm thinking this might even be a little bit less than that and
my other goal is to I want it to be able to withstand the weather I know a lot of
people that use these live in climates that don't necessarily have the greatest
winter and early growing season weather what this has going for it so far
is it's free
so the first thing you'll notice is that the the circle is about the same size as
the $2,500 hoop house so we're way ahead of the game already the second really
huge plus of this is that when you flip this over you get these little mounts
where the support legs sat and those are gonna be perfect for putting our PVC in
so we've already got a nice galvanized steel which is gonna be great for
weatherproof the steel also is gonna give us some great strength for the base
so we've got a great base to start with and the price was right let's go get
some materials
all right so far Google clocks forty-three cents
so I counted 12 of these which means I'm gonna have to have six big arches going
across like this all right so here's my pile of goods so far and you can see
that this is the gray PVC and the reason why I like grey is a couple of reasons
the gray is for electrical it's a lot better than the white PVC because it's
meant to go outside so it's UV protected or resistant and it'll last a lot lot
longer the other reason I like it is it has these has two different ends to it
it's got the female end and it's got the male end so when you put them together
you get one nice solid piece like that so I understand all these are going to
be just a little bit different but as luck would have it on mine this diameter
on this is just over an inch and my PVC is a one inch PVC so that slips down and
there perfect I was originally gonna make my hoops 20 feet because each of
these pieces is 10 feet long which means since there was 12 little outlets I
would need six arches so basically I would need 12 pieces of PVC but I'm
gonna show you why that's not gonna work
so I want to be able to stand up inside of here and it's not quite long enough
so I bought a couple of extra pieces I'm going to take those and I'm going to
piece them in the center and then we're gonna make it so it's tall enough that
you can stand up inside of it so I'm gonna try four feet and see how much of
a difference that makes obviously our male end right here will fit down into
the holder this coupler side is not going to fit down
so rather than hacking it off I'm going to take the piece that we just cut and
I'm gonna put the two coupler ends with the piece in the middle and then well on
each end we'll have a piece that will fit down in the holder
all right so it looks like four feet is really really good
it's just a perfect height it gives you enough vertical wall that you can
actually get some beds and stuff in there
I do think before I go any farther I'm going to try and get the base secured
you can see it's kind of falling apart over here and the more the more hoops I
put in here the more it's going to want to kind of pull it apart okay so as I
put these in here it keeps pulling this apart so I'm gonna try and get these put
together I'm gonna drill a pilot hole in the inside so it's not rubbing on the
plastic when we get that on now I'm gonna take a self-tapping screw and just
screw that into that hole alright we're all screwed so to speak I want to take a
minute to welcome you to the channel if you've never been here before we do some
self sustained living some gardening some cooking and grilling some food
preservation and you get to join me and my family on our retirement at the age of
40 so take a moment to subscribe click the bell to get notifications of new
videos that come out if you like the content we provide make sure you give us
a thumbs up and feel free to drop us a comment we love hearing from you guys
okay so our base is nice and sturdy now we've got our first hoop across here I'm
gonna cut one more to go across here I'm gonna cut it at the same length so it
will actually help this from drooping a little bit and that'll give us a nice
foundation and another little tip if you can leave these out in the Sun so they
just kind of get beat on by the Sun a little bit it warms them up and they've
actually Bend a lot easier and a lot nicer so now that we know that
everything fits you need some solvent cement this is actually made for the
gray PVC I believe you can probably also use an all-purpose but you want to make
sure I think the difference between the gray PVC is its it's okay if Sun beats
on it it doesn't make it brittle over time so we have a really nice base but
I'm not liking where these come together right here because we're gonna have six
of those they're gonna be really ugly and they're gonna kind of be mish-mashed
so I found one of these so if you're looking for these these are actually
called a cross tee this is one-inch PVC they don't actually make them in the
gray they only make them in schedule 40 white as far as I know I looked for a
little bit and I couldn't find him even even on the internet I couldn't find him
what would really be helpful is if you could find one of these where all of the
hoops would come into it but I don't know that they make them maybe a
greenhouse supply company may would make one if you know about one please let
leave me a comment in the comment section because it would be very helpful
just with that mishmash of where everything kind of comes together so
this will actually help clean it up quite a bit I'm only gonna have three of
these where all of the hoops come together so they'll kind of just sit on
top of each other and then we've got our cross tees we need this is a 3/8 by 6
inch and it's an exterior carriage bolt and if you need a drill bit that will
clear that carriage bolt we're gonna drill a hole in the middle of this and
we're gonna pop this through all three of these and that will keep them all
solid and nice nice and together so along with the carriage bolt I've got a
nut obviously and two washers and a lock washer we're gonna take our four foot
section we're just going to cut that in half that'll give us some room to add
that tee in and then while I'm at it I'm actually gonna cut a few more of these
and that way we can finish our hoops
all right so what you're going to end up with is three of these cross sections
like this then these are going to be the cross sections for your 12 hoops
like a bird on a tree
I'm just sitting here I got time
it's clear to see from up here
the world seems small
we can sit too
it's so beautiful you and me
okay we're down to our last couple of steps for the frame I want to just kind
of bulk this up a little bit just because it's gonna be affected by the
wind if we don't now I'm gonna do that as take some half-inch electrical PVC
same as what we use for the frame it's just a little bit narrower and we're
gonna build a circle that goes all the way around here so before we do that we
need to make sure that this is good and set down all the way around you need to
make sure that all of those are completely set down as far as you can
and then you can see this one has a hole on each side so ideally you could just
run a bolt through there and just that would keep it down nice and tight for
now I think I'm just gonna take just a screw and run it down through there
just to get it started but we need to do that all the way around so I'm gonna
take one of my scrap pieces of PVC I'm gonna figure out how high I want this to
sit on all I'm gonna mark it
it's where I've marked the proper height i'm going to drill a hole right on that line in the
center take some of your left over one inch drill a hole all the way through it and
then take a bigger drill bit and just on one side so what this will allow you to
do is you have two holes in there you can slide this smaller half inch through
it and just kind of thread the needle all the way around then we're going to
need 12 just little itty bitty screws those are going to go through here and
onto the thick hoop PVC so the great thing about this method too is if you
wanted to add another one of these or even two or three more of these to just
really get it to be rigid if you're in a high wind area it's totally doable and
it's not gonna get in the way of anything it's just gonna add a little
bit of extra cost okay so now that our frame is done let's total up the cost
and see what we're into this for I've got a feeling we're pretty well under
$100 so I do want to let you know the hundred dollars is just for the frame I
figured a lot of people will want to do their own kind of plastic maybe make
their own kind of door however I am gonna make a part two and I'll put it
out next week and that'll show us how to make the door we'll get it fastened down
with some stakes I'll show you how to make some stakes for real inexpensive
and then best of all I'm gonna make it so it's self watering so you can throw
it on a timer and it'll just water itself every day alright so for our
total we've got 15 pieces of one-inch PVC those are three dollars and 73 cents
apiece that gives us a total of fifty five dollars and ninety-five cents so
next we have three pieces of half-inch PVC those are two dollars and 21 cents
apiece that gives us a total of 6.63 cents
next we have three of the PVC cross tees in schedule 40 those are nine dollars
and fifty for cents and then we have some various
carriage bolts screws nuts bolts you know all that kind of stuff that was
eleven dollars and two cents and don't forget the most important part was our
trampoline and that was free our grand total is only eighty three dollars and
four cents so building a DIY geodesic dome greenhouse my original one that I
purchased was twenty five hundred so in less than eighty five dollars you could
build several of them if you wanted to so if you found the video helpful and
hopefully it spurred some ideas of your own make sure you give me a thumbs up I
always welcome comments if you have improvements or suggestions for me in
order to improve the design don't forget to join me next week when we're gonna
cover it with some greenhouse plastic we're gonna fasten it to the ground
we're going to put the door in and we're also going to make it self watering in
the meantime this is retired at 40 remember to live life simple we'll catch
you next week