This Funny Little Bungalow, aka The Cactus House has been without a greenhouse for too long.

I tell a lie – there are greenhouses here. Many of them. But they’re in pieces under the soil. Demolished many years ago when Mr “Cactus” Innes gave up his Sussex nursery, and the house changed hands.

But greenhouses under the sod are of no use to me, and so we have been searching for an intact one (free on Marketplace, of course) for a while.

Big Seymour likes Marketplace. As well as reels of self-levelling compound in action and replays of x-factor ballad legends that make him cry, he likes to scroll through Marketplace and search for stuff.

His wish list consists of: log cabins, quad bikes, mowers, tiles, free wood, water fountains, French doors, black pipe, building sand, roof lights, Landrovers, sleepers, swimming pools, generic free stuff and greenhouses.

(I hasten to add that if he brings another broken mower onto this property, I have promised to spontaneously combust, but quite a few of the other things are useful.)

Eventually, he found a greenhouse, and whilst it was not the Edwardian, brick based, wooden framed beauty we had coveted (even these come up cheap sometimes but you have to be quick), it was free. Quite large, prettier than your average and not far from home.

I would like to mention here that Big Seymour is not afraid of dismantling and collecting stuff, nor spending several hours, if not days, in a stranger’s garden, to acquire a free anything, and this is just what we did last May, with Boy Seymour helping and me being way out of my comfort zone, traipsing endlessly in and out someone’s personal space.

Luckily, the process was relatively hassle-free, if you don’t count the little boy of the house requiring the Heimlich Manoeuvre as we became a spectator sport; so beguiled was with our antics he that he inhaled a strawberry. And after Big Seymour had done his usual trick of swearing at complicated points and declaring that the whole effort might have been wasted (as is his wont) the greenhouse eventually ended up in bits in my garden.

Once there, it looked just like a pile of old crap, making me wonder why the heck we had bothered. And there its sat for months.

Fast forward to last Friday and the wind must have changed, because Big Seymour came home illuminated. He’d been thinking, after I had said that, owing to its non-Edwardianness, and general lack of aesthetic appeal, I didn’t really want to see the greenhouse from the my house (I can be a diva). He listened! And the next thing I knew, he was digging out a slope in order to part bury the greenhouse in the ground. He spent money! He bought sleepers, and by the end of Sunday, we had completed the parapet wall in which the resurrected structure will nestle.

Soon, there will be germinating going on in our very own glasshouse.

It is mega. It will be amazing and I literally cannot believe that it will be… mine! Ok, it will be ours, but I can see some commandeering going on. It’ll be like the Wendy House at playschool all over again. I may just barricade myself in.

What will I do in there? You may well ask. I shall be productive! I will potter. I hope to grow flowers galore. And possibly some vegetables, but they don’t excite me as much. Mostly, I shall escape the housework.

But seriously, I feel a responsibility to embrace this house’s horticultural past, and grow something of worth. It may not be cacti, given the price of heating these days, but I might manage succulents. And in my quest to create beautiful borders, I am venturing over to Instagram and following lookinsidemygarden to learn all about perennials, annuals and all of those plants I have coveted but never really understood. I did have a spectacular hollyhock this year, though I suspect it was pure fluke. But next year, I want delphiniums, too! And foxgloves, and lupins, and echium… the list goes on.

It’s good to have goals. And these are my greenhouse ones right here.