Not too big and nothing over the top technical wise. You would think hey it’ll be standing in a weekend and we can start growing those little seeds that need a bit more warmth.

Well I suppose this might be possible, if the instructions delivered with it were written in a form of English that doesn’t require you to have an engineer’s degree. Yesterday I spent the whole day together with my partner and a friend to make some sense out of the instructions. They start off with one set which shows you images and names of all the different parts. As you start reading through them and assembling the green house you discover that the manufacturer decided to name the parts differently, which I presume reads nicely in a novel, as you don’t want to re-use the same words but I can tell you it doesn’t help you one bit in a set of instructions.

Now you’re well on your way assembling all the parts and opening all the packaging, when suddenly you discover you have 4 separate leaflets with some more instructions and tips. Greenhouse… something to be assembled outside… English weather, well let’s say when it gets a bit windy and your garden is covered in manual papers… I think you can guess the rest. But still doing ok, until suddenly you find some more instructions, on which suddenly it tells you ‘make sure you have done… before going to page…’ Well this called for a break and a large glass of wine as to not lose our smile and simply our sanity. So there we were taking the whole thing apart again, until after 2 more attempts of this we finally got it standing.

My point: the people writing a manual, please bare in mind that we haven’t all been to university and studied engineering. Write them in a logical order, meaning don’t say after page 19 that should have done so and so before doing the previous pages. And try and write them in one set. Especially for an outdoor construction in a windy country, it really is not very handy having 7 different sets of manuals.