Alan's Brick Oven, Part 1

Some of you will have heard Alan and I talking about the brick oven Alan is building in our back garden. This is going to be an Italian-style bread and pizza oven.

Here's a few pictures of the construction process...

The hole we dug for the concrete slab. It is 8" deep in the middle. We actually raised the mesh height slightly after this pic was taken.



Here's the truck we rented from Home Depot.



We needed its 3000lb load capacity, and it still took us two trips to bring home sixty 80lb bags of concrete.



We didn't have time to take pictures during the concrete pouring process. We got into a system of working. Alan would heft a bag of concrete into the mixer, I'd pass him a measured bucket of water, he poured that in. Mix for two minutes while I get another bag. Pour out the concrete into the hole; I get busy with the spade and spread out the concrete while Alan hefts another bag... This was bloody hard work and we demolished some beer afterwards, I can tell you.

Here's the slab five days later, after it had dried out.



Fast forward a couple of weeks, and we got some bricks. Here's the first layer.



Of course, no building work can be done without feline supervision ;-)



Three rows...



Fourth and last row, with angle iron to make the support for the opening. Note the difference in shadow angle; we can put only one row of bricks in our car at a time, so between the third and fourth row was lunch and the journey to the shop and back.



The bricks will get concrete poured down their holes tomorrow for strength, and then we start framing up for the slab to be poured on top.

Watch this space...