Happiness and Misadventures

A Wooden Cold Frame

One of the aspects I prefer about living in the new home is the freedom of creating anything: stone walls, woodsheds, green areas, vegetable gardens… You name it. I’m slowly transitioning into a curious man who likes to give shape to things.

My girlfriend is the brain and I am the arms: she sees ideas on Pinterest and Instagram1, shares them with me, and says, “You could do it.” Yeah, like if I have a great experience.

Well, in the last few months I was surprised by myself.

The latest idea was a cold frame for plants. All I got was this grainy picture from Pinterest:

A quite pixelated black and white drawing of a cold frame made of wood.
I got the idea, but…

Using my advanced hacker skills, I reverse-searched the image and found this old pdf from a 2012 Internet Archive capture. There was a full scheme, great!

But I didn’t follow it. First, it used Imperial units, and they should be banned.2 Second, the materials used are not the same I’d easily find here in Italy. I have plenty of beadboard, so the main structure will be made with that. Also, the renovation left me tons of wood scraps, sometimes quite good but different from one another, so I wanted to make do with what I had.

My father is always happy to help me create something with wood, so we together deep-dived into this project without thinking too much. It seemed quite straightforward, so we started with the four main legs, the bottom shelf, and then we assembled the main container with the beads.

As a cover, we used a plexiglass panel I already had, and based all the measurements around it. After a rainy night, I saw that water had leaked inside. Then I cut a piece of an old rain gutter — another waste from the renovation — to cover the top part. With a circular saw I had just received as a birthday present3, I refined some wood slats and we created the mechanism to quickly open the cover.

Two photos of the almost finished cold frame, with the cover open and then closed.
Simple yet effective. Notice the gutter on the top.

Finally, my girlfriend and I painted it with a very nice red tone we discovered — and with which she fell in love. Here is the final result, ready for the winter.

The cold frame painted in red, with the cover opened.
I’ve only just noticed that the shelf inside is missing in this photo!

And, placed next to the house…

Side view from my house, with the cold frame visible on the left corner.
One of the very few afternoons with no strong wind this spring.

It may not be much, but for me it’s a little piece of art!


🎧 Another Alice In Chains phase

📖 Still on Dawn, things are getting more interesting


  1. About that, it’s scary to observe the speed with which AI content is flooding the web. ↩︎

  2. I wanted to be humorous about this, but we should seriously do something about this… gap between us. ↩︎

  3. That’s exactly the kind of gift I would never have thought to receive until a couple of years ago. ↩︎


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