There was a pretty long wood fired oven hiatus during the winter, mostly because the weather was too cold to apply the mortar.  Throw in a handful of other projects and it led to a delay of many months.

I finally got back to it recently, and am getting close to being finished.  My first session back I set the soldier course and the first row of bricks above that, and just about every weekend I would do another couple rows or one of the three arches.  Three weeks ago I finally set the keystone, which was a banner event.

Last weekend I finished the forms and cast the oven vent using castable refractory - a very high heat tolerant version of cement.  It has a very dry and crumbly consistency, especially if you are used to using concrete.  I opted for this route as I was pretty sick of cutting bricks, and wanted the inside of the vent to draw really well so there wouldn’t be smoke out of the front of the oven.

I’m in the process of curing the oven now to drive out all of the moisture.  I imagine it will take a little over a week to complete, I’ll slowly ramp up the temperature a bit at a time until I can get close to the right temperature for making wood fired pizza in the oven.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 degrees F.

Slowly but surely making progress on the oven.  Since we last spoke I glommed onto my neighbor’s concrete order to pour the bridge slab and fill the cells of the block wall.  I helped him pour a sidewalk, and afterward the truck backed on up and turned what would have been hours upon hours of lugging bags of quickcrete around into a very short and simple process.

While the slab cured I got some of the rest of my materials: insulation, firebricks, and mortar.  I measured and cut the insulation to match the footprint of the oven floor, and it turned out I had one entire sheet left over.  Not wanting to have it sit in the basement indefinitely, I decided to add a second 2″ layer of insulation - that calcium silicate board surrounded by a moat of ‘vermicrete.’  That is a mixture of anywhere from 5:1 to 10:1 vermiculite and portland.  Again, wanting more insulation, I went with 10:1.  Weird stuff, especially if you’re used to concrete.

That set up fine, and I next laid the second layer of insulation board followed by my floor bricks, which had been roughly trimmed to match the oven footprint.  I mixed together a 1:1 combination of fireclay (not to be confused with mortar!) and silica sand, and spread it out with a notched trowel under each layer to help get things level.  Once the floor bricks were set, I used my little Makita polisher to grind out some of the high spots in the floor - firebricks are pretty far from consistently sized.

So now I have cut the first ’soldier’ course of bricks angled at the back to make for a smaller mortar joint, and also cut the first row of bricks above that into a trapezoid shape - again, less of the really expensive mortar, and more of the relatively cheap bricks.

I also fashioned an ‘indespensible tool’ which is basically some square tubing, a hinge, and a bracket.  When you swivel that around on the hinge, the arm tells you the correct distance from the center as well as the angle to (in theory, anyway) build a perfectly dome-shaped dome.  The black stuff is just a scrap of leftover siding from our house.

So now I wait for the right mortar…the stuff I originally got comes in a 15lb. pail and is ‘air set’ - meaning it gets hard when exposed to air.  Unfortunately it is not designed for outdoor applications and won’t hold up over time to humidity.  I’m trying to find anyone around to source the material from, and the two best options at this point ring in at $100 per 50lb. bag when you include shipping.  That is about double the ‘real’ price, so I’m trying to figure out options.

A few more steps completed for the oven.  I built a frame out of 2×4’s to set the plywood floor on.  Over this plywood, concrete will be poured to form the building surface of the oven.

Next, I built the edges out of some old 2×8’s and a 2×6 standing on edge.  These will frame the sides of the slab.

I’m not entirely sure why, but it seemed like a good idea to lay plastic over the plywood, primarily to make the boards easier to get out at the end. I’m really reinforcing my pack rat nature with this project, every scrap of lumber used thus far has been repurposed from the house build.  The plywood I fashioned together from leftover triangles of 5/8″ OSB that in any other project would have been thrown out or burned a year ago.

The final step was to put in some steel reinforcement.  I cut two strips of remesh the length of the top of the oven, and overlapped them, threading them over the upright rebars.  I then bent the rebar down horizontal, and laid some additional pieces in a grid on top of the mesh.

It looks like I may get lucky and get some concrete on Thursday, my neighbor is pouring a sidewalk and I’m going to tack on a yard to the truck to fill the cells of my wall and pour the slab.  Next up, I need some super-isol board for the insulation under the dome, and a whole mess of firebricks.

The latest excuse to hide more concrete into the structure is a wood fired oven.  I got the plans from Forno Bravo after seeing a few of these in blogs.

A few weeks back we poured an extension to the back patio slab with a knockout for the oven. I got a pallet of blocks, and a few bags of masonry cement and I was ready to roll.

I had a bit too much fall in the slab so I had to taper the blocks to get the first row level.  Doug helped me get the first row set and level, and I did the rest from there.  The plans call for dry stacking the blocks, but since the first row had to be cut it was a lot easier to get it level with the aid of some mortar, and hey, why stop there.

I drilled some holes in the slab and put some #4 rebars upright through the walls, these will be bent over into the bridge slab to tie the walls and the slab together.  The plans also indicated that the fourth row of blocks should span the doorway, but that seemed like too much of a stoop, so I will just span that with the concrete floor.

Next up, I will build a form with some 2×4’s and plywood to make a lid over this structure somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5″ thick, and then a layer of 2″ insulation goes on top of that.  Then it is time to start building the dome out of firebricks.

This may be a bit much in an era when a lot of people are too lazy to even drive out to pick up a pizza, but I’d like to reserve judgement on that until I’ve tried my first homemade wood fired pie.

We have not been doing too much around the house of late, but as the weather cools down motivation seems to be going up.  There are actually a lot of new features, but this photo glut is about landscaping.  We’ve grown tired of looking at the weeds and decided to clean things up a bit, starting with a bed around the house.

Enjoy.

Details will come later, but here are some pictures to show the progress we made this weekend!

This should keep you busy for a few minutes…

As expected woefully behind on updates.  It feels like we have been struggling to stay ahead of the trades for several months, and are finally getting a little bit of a break.

Beginning with the installation of the central vac to stay ahead of the drywall hangers, there has always been a pressing need to do something to get out of the way of something else.  I took a break over the past few days to work on a side project, a much needed break from sanding baseboards - more on that in just a bit.  First I’ll catch you up on the highlights since my last post.

• As mentioned, Doug and I installed the pipes for the central vaccum.  The unit is not installed yet, but is standing dutifully by in the mechanical room waiting.  This was to stay in front of the…
• Drywall hanging.  This stage changed things immensely and was terribly messy and loud.  I cringed nearly all day every day sure they were going to destroy something.  No serious damage done, but one of them did step into a return air duct.  Lucky he didn’t fall through into the basement.  Not the most personable crew, but to borrow a phrase from my days at PacifiCare, when you pay peanuts you get monkeys.  Doug and I hung the drywall in the storage room downstairs (this wasn’t part of their original bid) to stay in front of the…
• Drywall finishers.  I never thought the inside of the house would look so much like a war zone.  On top of the slop, they had space heaters to crank the heat up to 80 degrees, along with about 98% humidity.  I literally couldn’t stay upstairs the kerosene fumes were so powerful.  They did a reasonable job as well with relatively few callbacks to finish things they left out or overlooked.  Several fuel spills that wept through the paper and plastic into the concrete floor were a cause for some distress, but no permanent damage was done.
• Endless priming and painting. Once the drywall was finished, we made a mad dash to prime the whole house in a weekend.  The walls we mostly did with rollers, and I did the ceilings with an airless sprayer.  A little fickle to keep spraying at times, but a huge time saver.  Especially with all the floors covered already, it made painting the many square feet of ceiling a reasonable job.
• Garage floor.  Doug and I poured just shy of 16 yards in the garage, and I had some extra pex tubing so I put that under the slab to enable me to someday hook it up to a solar collector to heat the floor.  The floor is incredibly flat and still very shiny, Doug used a power trowel until late the day of the pour and I put two coats of cure and seal on it.
• Garage doors installed.  Through an understandable miscommunication, the wrong color doors were installed, but no big deal.  They are steel doors trimmed with cedar, the only hangup is the steel is painted a beige color, not at all how it appeared in the photos.  Very paintable, just need to add that to the list.
• Furnace activated.  Tommy came out and got everything live for us and mounted the swanky blue thermostat that can also be used to launch ICBMs.  Just in time too, as we apparently had a…
• Flue fire.  The exact cause is not known, but the greatest minds in fireplace science told us we had a flue fire at some point.  Wood that was too green, fires not hot enough (or too hot) and improper configuration of the flue pipe caused the thimble to get a hairline crack.  We pulled it out and called in the experts (thanks Malissa!).  No permanent damage done, just need to get it repaired.
• Floors finished.  Micah and his crew came back after we pulled up all the plastic (laden with drywall mud, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and assorted other detrius) and gave the floors a final polish, sealed the cracks, and added a few…accent pieces where we had previously left some knockouts.  They came back a bit later and poured the shower pan for the walk in master shower, which also turned out great.  I couldn’t be happier with the work they did.
• Lights! The electricians made several more trips to make lights / outlets hot, and to hang some fixtures.  They wired in the floor lights which look amazing (pics soon I promise…).  All has been well on that front except for the omission of data cables.  When we met initially, we had a fairly detailed conversation regarding the ability for a Cat-5E cable to support both voice and data, and I sprayed orange paint (three dots) in all the locations I wanted a plate with phone, ethernet, and coax.  Since we didn’t explicitly document it, of course they only ran one Cat-5E to each of the locations.  This one cable can support voice OR data, but not both.  Probably a small thing but highly annoying, and I wasn’t going to pay them to go back and run the additional wires.  So at some point I’ll be in the attic pulling those wires to get them done the right way.
• Siding has resumed after several fits and starts with Gene.  He is back with a new and much improved crew to repair and replace some of the damaged sheets, and they installed all of the cedar around the front entryway, which looks great around the…
• Front Door! After what seemed like a never ending staining / sanding / polyurethane / sanding / sanding project we got the door assembled and installed in the opening.  Of course the pre-hung door didn’t come with hinges or the lockset drilled all the way through so it isn’t fully functional yet, but it beats hell out of scraps of plywood and foam.
• I spent many hours assembling and installing the IKEA cabinets, of which every single component is packed flat - meaning much assembly required.  All in all it has gone great and we really like the cabinets and vanities.  The closet shelving (Stolmen) is pretty slick too.
• We have the interior stair railing built and installed, that was a project worthy of it’s own post.  We got 1 1/2″ square tubing, and doug welded it to a 3×5″ piece of angle iron bolted into the floor joists.  Each of the uprights has 5 holes drilled through it, and we pulled through 3/8″ wire rope and attached it with a series of turnbuckles.  Works great with the rest of the house.  We also have the back deck railing mostly installed as well.  Many of these tasks were done in a rush to satisfy the…
• Self-important bankers who were dead set on making things more difficult for us.  We had locked in a rate at which to convert our construction loan to permanent financing, and the bank kept asking me about ‘move-in readiness.’  Being a logical person, I would always ask them to define ‘move-in readiness’ in order to make sure I prioritized the right things.  Answers always varied but boiled down to ‘it depends on who is inspecting the house.’  When pressed for clarification, I would get helpful advice like
  

  Things that are functional are required, while cosmetic things are not.  For instance, you must have doors installed on all closets.

  At this point I stopped paying attention due to the cloud of smoke coming out of my ears. In the end they generated a ton of heat but no light, and all of their blustering came to nothing.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few things but I’m sleepy and you should probably get back to work.  As promised, here is my side project - I cast a sink for the guest bathroom out of concrete.  It took a fair amount of time to build the form and prep everything, but I think it will look great in there.  This is glass fiber reinforced concrete, or GFRC, which is a little different than a standard concrete countertop.

Cheers!

I am flounder, Gene is Eric Stratton.

The excitement continues at 488.  The drywall is up and we now have ROOMS!  Though the process about sent us both over the edge (imagine huge pieces of drywall being dragged across and dropped on brand new polished concrete floors) we are very pleased with the work that they completed.  The finishers will be here this week to mud, tape, and sand.  So the week between Christmas and New Years we should be able to clean things up a bit and start priming the walls and ceiling.  The storage room is the only room in the basement that we are finishing for now.  I am not sure that we will even let the primer dry before we start unpacking the POD.  Though the POD has been very convenient and their service impeccable, we are very ready to GET IT OUT OF THE YARD and find a few items that have been missing since the move.

To prep for the drywall Andy and Doug spent some very long hours last weekend replacing warped wall studs, reinforcing ceiling beams in the living room, framing in the garage doors, and building attic access doors.  I worked with Andy running speaker wire throughout the house so there is no shortage of good music in our future :).

The saga continues with the roofers.  The owner of the roofing company has apparently ‘lost it’ and is sending in crews with expectations that are impossible to achieve (sound familiar??).  If they finish the day without finishing our roof he fires most of the crew.  Helpful??  I don’t think so.  Anyway, so a really nice man named Charlie showed up yesterday as a subcontractor to our roofing contractor.  He seems to have a lot of experience and is supposed to ‘finish the job’ for Summit.  He was on the roof until dark in 10 degree, damp and windy weather and didn’t finish the job.  Before he left he told us that he is going to tell Summit that they will need more material and another guy to get the job done.  GULP!  I hope we see dear, sweet Charlie again…

As mentioned earlier we are finishing the storage room in the basement which means that the radiant tubing for the heated 1st floor  has to be hung this weekend.  This is Andy’s project and he has been scrambling to get the radiant tube design completed and the tubing attached to the underside of the floor.   It really isn’t a difficult application, however feeding >300 feet of very stiff PEX tubing through small holes at 9 feet is proving to be more troublesome than originally thought.  Keep your fingers crossed that things roll a little easier today and we get it all hung.

On top of Christmas shopping, I have had the distinct pleasure of picking out all of the lighting fixtures for the house.  Wow, has that been a time consuming task.  The big box stores didn’t get any of our business I can proudly say!  I have been purchasing our lighting from Bellacor, Croft and Little, The Lighting Universe and Euro Style lighting.

Enjoy the pics!