Building a homemade coldframe…from a wardrobe…
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
After spending most of my waking hours playing with the design of the blog, tagging old posts and being at work, i haven’t managed to take many photographs or do much more out in the garden apart from these above and below. When we moved into our new house we had no more need for the obligatory Argos wardrobe that everyone seems to have these days when they are young and poor. You have to make it yourself and the doors never seem to close properly!
So when the chance of a ‘new’ wardrobe that we could renovate for the bedroom came, we jumped at the chance…and the cold frame idea was born.
Now the words ‘I’ve created a monster…’ have never rung so true. Creating a flexible object like this in a tiny lounge in our old house ended with lots of sawdust, quite a few offcuts, and a hasty rewrite of plans.
I ended up using one of the wardrobes doors as the back support and one of the wardrobe sides as the front support. They were joined by 2 arms (short pieces of inch inch thick wood cut to size), one on either side, fixed with right angled shelf brackets for sturdiness. I attached these in using 6 screws per bracket. The coldframe was then varnished to protect it against the elements.
The lid was made from the shoe rack and top rack of the wardrobe. I attached them with a couple of hinges to the main structure. The perspex was a git to cut - i ended up scoring and snapping it into shape! That was then screwed to the top using some of the leftover struts, a little polythene was stapled over the ends and a couple of hooks were installed to hold up the lids against the wall.
Ironically, i then filled it with wood and logs in preparation for last winter as we had nowhere else to store it all. It is now empty apart from some nicely developing peas which i’ll post about soon.
I suppose this could be made by anyone with some simple DIY knowledge and a few tools. The main things to remember are to angle the top enough to catch the sun’s rays and to place it in a part of the garden where these are best received.
