Following the starter kit’s shopping list, I order the necessary goods one at a time on Amazon. One by one the tiny boxes begin arriving. I rely on the Royal Mail more than ever before, and on the caprices of package delivery in London — my foyer filling up with missed package slips, emergency-red. It is one of those city things I didn’t plan for: walking a mile and a half to the post office, during the appointed daytime hours, to collect lumpy parcels.

Time begins to flow through my fingers like dry soil. I start to think that maybe I should have gone to a shop, but that prospect, too, carries a peculiar wrinkle of city life. When your needs are complicated, no one single store can meet them all. It’s better just to order everything online in one go than to take a bus to some outlet, wander the scoured aisles, only to have to take another bus somewhere else. Even worse: having to call over there, asking for x or y, brand names and descriptions juddering awkwardly from your lips and across a spotty 3G-connection.

I receive a missed package notice scrawled with pen notes explaining that one of my items has been left with my neighbors. The scary gardening ones downstairs. I would rather buy a roll of masking tape all over again than knock and ask for it from them. And so I do. (They have yet to return my package to me, either. Hoarding my masking tape, the old persimmons.)

In the end I get all the supplies, the bulbs and fans and tapes and films, strips and adapters, arrayed across my bedroom floor alongside my carelessly flung party clothes and shoes. The white plastic buckets, which I don’t need to line with Mylar because they are already reflective, arrive in a stack sealed tightly with a trash bag and packing tape. My partner is becoming skeptical that I’ll ever be able to wrangle this disorder into a garden. I, on the other hand, am confident I will soon sell him on the appeal of Space Buckets.

I tie my hair in a bandana and put on a sick psychedelic mix. I heat a screwdriver in boiling water and begin to bore drainage holes into the bottom of my bucket. I gleefully snip the connectors off the PC fans. I read instructions and re-read them; I need to cut big holes in the buckets in order to mount the fans. I have to strip the fan wires. I have an IKEA screwdriver and a pair of IKEA kitchen scissors that we use to cut pizza. With a hot bread knife, heated with boiling water, I press my full weight into the bucket on my bedroom floor and saw away.

For a while, I feel bootstrapping and very powerful. But when my knife gets stuck in the plastic (its blade is stamped with IKEA, too) and I accidentally snip off a fan wire I meant to strip, I start to remember why I hated shop class as a girl. My voice gets thin and high when I fully mangle one of the buckets, a sad hole bulging out of it in entirely the wrong place. The kitchen scissors break. My housemates are not going to be happy about this. The revolution is delayed.

Here’s the problem: I do not own any tools. There are no real tools in our apartment besides a hammer, pliers, and a screwdriver, like in a dimly recalled Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood song. My parents had tools when I was a child — I could step into the cool dark of their two-car garage and smell barbecue charcoal, mulch, and motor oil, and look at them all. Each in its place on a perforated board with outlines drawn around it, to recall where it hung. Tools just sort of belonged to my idea of home back then, the way the garden did.

I don’t have anything I had when I was a kid. I don’t have anything my parents had, I think.

I need tools, and to replace the bucket I destroyed, so I head to the home improvement store B&Q in Greenwich to buy more buckets: 20-liter/five-gallon plastic ones with lids. I will know what I’m looking for on sight — it’s not a rare item. I was surrounded by these buckets growing up. Which is why it’s so unusual when the B&Q doesn’t have any. Neither does the other branch on Old Kent Road, nor the Wickes (another DIY retailer in London). No buckets with lids at all.

I am dwarfed by aisles of tools, by improvement goods, by buckets full of grout or cement or paint. I can identify maybe every tenth object my eyes fall upon. The tools — the drill bore, the hand saw, the wire cutter — are intimidating, glittery, clad in gunmetal and safety orange. And they are expensive — investments for homeowners, not for the likes of me. This entire place is lined with tile selections, fixture options, different colors of caulk, things that will never be part of my world. I can’t make a Space Bucket. I can’t even paint my bedroom.

In the garden center I find a lone, packaged “Strawberry Growing House” sitting by itself. It’s a miniature greenhouse that comes with 12 little biodegradable planters, a bag of compost, a packet of strawberry seeds, and stickers to decorate it. It costs 10 pounds—just over $14. It’s meant for kids.

At the end of my experiment, a corner of my room is piled with about 100 pounds’ ($140) worth of Space Bucket abortion. The miniature strawberry greenhouse, though, sits on the windowsill, lined with dewdrops and heat. I added all the little stickers to its frame. There is a sliding plastic bit on the top so I can ventilate it once the shoots come up.