This job is best done in mild sunny weather, when the plastic will be dry can stretch some but not too much. Arrange for a windless day to spread plastic – that is, less than 5mph winds, tops! If necessary do the plastic spreading at dusk, when the wind drops. Or at dawn in summer, but not in cold weather.
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Our History of Replacing Hoophouse Plastic: A Story of Four Mistakes and Two Near-Misses
Mistake No. 1
We put up our hoophouse in the fall of 2003. Initially we pulled the plastic too tight, and the screws that held the wigglewire channel to the Eastern Red Cedar baseboards gave up and popped off. I recommend people to bolt the wigglewire channel through the baseboards from day one. We dealt with our problem by adding metal strip battens that fit inside the channel over the plastic and the wigglewire, and bolted them all the way through the baseboard. We knew this meant we’d have a longer job when we changed the plastic as we’d have to remove all the battens. That time came in 2007.
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Mistake No. 4
2013 was also busy, so we decided to just do the roof plastic that year and do the end plastic the next year. Several of the baseboards were rotted, so we also had to replace those. We had termites too. Removing the old baseboards involved removing more rusty bolts. Another slow frustrating job. Good thing we weren’t doing the end walls too! We also took the opportunity to add diagonal braces to the windward end of the frame, as the end wall had started to lean in. This time we made the opposite mistake with the plastic – we pulled the plastic too tight and trimmed it before we realized. …………
Near-Miss No. 1
In 2014 we replaced the end wall plastic. Happily we noticed just in time that we should not cut the 24’ plastic in half at 12’, otherwise both pieces would have been too short to reach the peak. We went with the outside being in one piece, and the inside having a seam across just above the apex window. You could, of course, buy bigger plastic! It’s easiest to plastic the whole end wall, then cut out the doors and windows. With luck, the cutout pieces will serve to cover the door and window frames. …………
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Article source: Mother Earth News
Image source: same as above