Wood Fired Oven, Now Open!

Ta DA!
The big reveal of the almost finished WFO enclosure complete with mid-October snow which, thankfully, was only temporary.
The enclosure is clad in Hardi-panel with exposed fasteners just like the house, and eventually it will get a couple of coats of paint in the same color as well. The roof is galvanized corrugated steel, a nod to the other component of our houses' exterior finish. I recessed the front wall with the intent to add swinging doors to provide some weather protection for the mosaic I hope to add on that surface next season.
So, not the fully finished, beautified enclosure I hoped to have by this time, but instead a work in progress that I look forward to revisiting again come springtime.
And it was just in the nick of time.
As my awesome luck would have it, I had planned a big neighborhood party for just a few days after the picture was taken, and the weather in the preceding few weeks was so awful that my plan to spend them finishing the whole deal and pretty-ing it up in time for my guests was completely foiled. I had to just go for the important functional bits, one of which was pouring a concrete landing and countertop. In 35ish degree weather, the wet work of pouring and finishing a concrete slab was NO fun. But I survived and the counter turned out just fine. My first foray into casting in place vs. molding, and also my first time working with curves:


I've tidied it up a bit with the diamond pads since, but then I got crazy busy again and still haven't gotten around to giving it a good full-on polishing. I'm sure I'll be kicking myself if I leave it until spring because it will be much harder and harder to work, but that's likely to be what happens. I'm just glad I was able to get it poured in time, as having the extra bit of workspace was great while I was running the oven for a crowd.
We ended up with a pretty big turnout for the grand opening, and I think I did about 40 pizzas total along with a ton of artichoke dip and some roasted veg. Most importantly, we got a weather reprieve just in time...some gorgeous crisp sunny weather which was as good as I could have hoped for after a month of constant rain:

Rambling in a Snowstorm

What's under the big blue tarp? I'd show you if it would stop raining...or snowing...for half a minute.

I continue to be thwarted by the icky weather we've had lately. Just when I finally get a free weekend and a couple of days to put some serious effort into finishing the wood fired oven enclosure, it rains nonstop and is like 40. Or like 35 and snowing. Totally boo.

So, in lieu of a fun progress report on that project, I bring you my very own installment of "Keeping it Real" as Pioneer Woman would say.

Check this out:

I found this photo the other day when I was digging through one of my file boxes. It's of our previous house, shortly after the lovely gold masonite siding was replaced with the even lovlier environmental tradgedy of grey vinyl siding, and a couple of years before that SO fabulous custom painted garage door was replaced with one that couldn't be read from the window seat of a passing 747. Yep, that door was so awesome we just HAD to let it hang around for a few extra years. Cool, huh?
ahem.

Yep. I lived there. That was our old house. A plain Jane, crackerbox 70's rambler in a neighborhood of plain Jane 70's ramblers and 80's split levels. About as ordinary as it gets.

Except for that garage door, that is.

It taught me a lot, that house. It's where I really cut my chops in the art of not being afraid to TRY, and I'm hoping by showing it to you you'll see that I'm no different than anyone else who has a dream of doing something.
I wasn't then and I'm not now some fancy, entitled person of substance for whom things like designing and building a cool house just happen. And I'm telling you this because sometimes I get afraid that maybe you guys think I'm something that I'm not. That Modern in MN came to be because I am special...that I can do crazy projects like make stuff out of concrete and build things and paint graffiti on the walls because I have something you don't. Maybe you think I'm somehow not like you? Different....or exceptional in some way? And maybe you read my blog and think that you'd love to do that, but then you tell yourself that you are TOTALLY not the kind of person for whom anything like any of that would ever be possible.

So the deal is, I need you to know that you're wrong. And honestly, I used to think that same thing. But then I decided I was sick of not doing things or finding answers to things because they seemed scary or because I was afraid. And so I jumped off the cliff. And that particular cliff, the design and build your own house cliff, was SO big and SO scary, really. But not a single day has passed since then that I haven't been glad that I did it, and not just because it all turned out ok and now I get to live someplace cooler than the plain Jane 747 garage door house.
The awesome thing about those big scary leaps, even the ones that were major screw-ups, is that it's made all of the other scary leaps of life that have followed a lot less than all that, and it's made it easier see how much that silly little thing called fear worms its way into so many parts of our lives where it really has no business being. It was and continues to be about much more than just building a house.

So what's your dream? More importantly, what's getting in the way of it? What are you not doing in your life because it seems scary? Are you really living, or just mitigating fear?

IT'S ALIVE!!

Turns out the whole wood fired oven thing actually works as advertised!

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the WFO project ended up reminding me of the end of our house build. Although on a much smaller and MUCH less stressful scale, once I finally got it to the point where it was done enough to actually be put to use I discovered, or rather I am discovering, that the way I think about it hasn't caught up. So here we are again, all of the sudden, with a mostly finished project that works and is usable and that we can enjoy while my brain is still playing that "when the WFO is done... " track.
Perhaps that explains why I've been a major loser in the photography department. It's either that, or, as I was just explaining to someone else, the whole WFO pizza cookery event is somewhat ill-suited to photojournalism, what with the timing issues invovled. And the smoke, of course.

So when I left you last, the build was complete and we were spending a few days on air drying. From there we progressed to a very exciting first fire. A wee one so as not to get things too hot while moisture might still be hanging around in the bricks and mortar that would cause havoc by expanding when it turned to steam.

Smoke from the flue=crazy exciting!

Even a wee fire is good enough for this sugar addict to cook up some marshmallows for smores:


Moving on to a bit bigger fire:


And finally, a bigger, hotter fire that was enough to get some serious heat in the hearth bricks and produce a couple of gorgeous calzones for dinner:



Those burnt ends are evidence of what happens when you step away from the oven just long enough to grab the camera from inside the house. Char, baby....wHOOHOO! And char, or more specifically a controlled, just-a-bit-of-char kind of thing, is part of what the WFO is all about when it comes to dough.
And seriously, is this not just about the best looking calzone you've ever seen? Check out that crusty browned goodness...and all from FIVE minutes of cooking:


and it got even better on the inside:

not bad for a practice, warm-up fire and literally 10 minutes of prep using whatever I could dig out of the fridge. Veggie for me, pepperoni and cheese for Boy. We were practically yelping with delight. I'm saying without a doubt these were the best calzones I've ever made or eaten, and I suspect it's only going to get better from here.

Boy was thinking maybe we need to take before WFO and after WFO pictures of ourselves so we can appreciate the effect all the forthcoming edible practice will have on our waistlines...
We'll title that essay "why NOT to build a WFO" :)

Ready to Fire!

Think of this like a TV cooking show, where there's some babble and some stuff thrown about in a pan for a minute before the cut to the swap out reveals a finished, ready-to-go version of whatever they pretended to be showing you the process of making:



We have WFO! My apologies for being so completely lax as to not have taken a single in-progress photo since we last spoke. Turns out that masonry business is dusty and dirty and sort of consuming, and I sort of hand my hands full.
Of mortar, that is.
And I was preoccupied with trying to wash the brick dust out of my hair.

But as of now I am pleased to announce that we are just a few days away from starting to fire, and that means we're just a few more days away from a virgin WFO pizza event!

So there it sits, and so far so good with the dome and arches actually doing their self-supporting thing. The plan is to let it air dry for a week or so before swaddling it in a bunch of ceramic fiber blanket insulation and starting a series of small-to-big curing fires that culminate in a full on, white hot bricks blaze to get the oven up to pizza cookery temperature. At that point, in addition to cooking lots and lots of pizza and other stuff, and assuming no catastrophies, we'll start on finishing the exterior and making it look like something other than a tarp-covered lump.

I am SO excited, and so happy to have the masonry portion of the build over with, because honestly, all that negative space geometry was starting to make my brain hurt just a little and I'm sure my neighbors are totally over seeing me up on that platform bent over with my butt in the air looking like one of those redneck yard ornaments. Hopefully the pizzas I make them will be enough to make up for that horror.

And, as an added bonus, a WHOLE bunch of firewood just landed in our yard. Actually, some tree guys just happened to show up at the right time and with the right price and I gave them the go-ahead to cut down a big old oak tree that's been dead ever since we've been here.



A mighty fine cord or so of firewood, no? Huge, HUGE props to Boy for becoming our resident lumberjack and splitting everything you see plus lots, lots more. Because really, it's a lot to ask from a computer geek who's about as far from your typical wood chopping dude as a guy can get. But he was totally into it. He even geeked out on the equipment end of the chore and went out and found a local specialty dealer and bought himself some fancy axe from Sweden that he refused to tell me the price of which means it musta been sort of outrageous. But I'm sure not going to complain, because needless to say, splitting, moving and stacking all that wood has been a TON of work....work that brings me that much closer to a functional oven.

I need to make that Boy a pizza. Or several.

Oven Floor and Going Up

Here's the hearth bricks cut and ready to set on the insulation base:


I'm building a 36" diameter oven so I just cut a paper template for that plus the area covered by the vent opening and landing, laid out a grid of bricks and then traced the pattern onto them to mark the cuts. It's recommended these hearth bricks be set in a herringbone pattern to make it easier to slide a pizza peel across the surface without catching.

Placing and leveling the hearth bricks on the insulation took a bit of time and a couple of do-overs. The ceramic fiber insulation board I purchased was claimed to be a flat, consistent surface but that was not at all what I received. Like At. All., which was sort of annoying, and I ended up having to put a layer of vermicrete (vermiculite+portland cement at about 8:1) on top of it plus a dressing of brick dust before I could set the hearth. So much for favoring time savings over cost. I'm sure the ceramic fiber board will be a fantastic insulator, but it ended up being a bit of a pain in my butt.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff! From here it's been a wet, dirty activity this brick laying business.
As suggested by some of those who have gone before me, I purchased a tool called "The Angleizer" to help me figure out the shape of the bricks for each circular layer. It's like four sliding, adjustable rulers attached together. Basically, you plug the diameter of your circle and the size of the bricks into a little computer program and it spits out the measurements of the trapezoid shape for the bricks in each course. Then it's just a matter of setting the tool accordingly and marking and cutting each brick. For a mathematically challeneged person like me, it makes things a whole lot easier.


Another handy, not thought up by me concoction is the rod and angle bracket tool you see. There's lots of ways one could make this tool, and I cobbled mine together with a hunk of threaded rod, some repurposed IKEA parts and a hinge. It's set up to turn 360 degrees and through a 180 degree arc. The angle bracket fixed to one end allows each brick to be set at exactly (or close enough) the right pitch and distance from the center, ensuring a perfectly-ish circular, dome-shaped dome. Another super deluxe time saver, plus it holds the brick in place for as long as necesary until the mortar sets up.

Bridge Slab on the WFO Base

Almost to the fun parts!
The countertop height upper slab upon which the actual oven dome will be built is an unsupported "bridge" that spans the CMU base we just finished building. That means all that's there in the end is a heavily reinforced concrete slab supported on the edges with a big open space below. If you followed along with our house build, it's basically a variation on the construction of our front stoop.

Now, because construction of this type of slab presents the possibility of a ton or so of wet concrete on top of a collapsed form in the middle of a pour, constructing a sturdy support structure is critical. It needs to be strong and reliable to hold up all that wet concrete without sagging or moving yet still be able to be removed once the slab has cured.

Here's the preliminary form. On the top you can see the sheet of plywood that fits into the opening of the base and forms the main platform upon which the concrete will be placed. Before we proceeded, this board got split down the middle to allow it to be removed from below once the slab has cured. Underneath is a couple of stout 2x4 frames to hold the whole thing up, built with plenty of attention paid to ease of removal afterward. The outside of the form is 2 x 6's supported, braced. We shimmed the supports to make the top of th form, and thus the surface of the slab, completely level.


After the form was finished and verifiably sturdy, I cut and tied rebar in a 1' grid and topped that with a sheet of rebar mesh, all of which ends up embedded in the slab. Since concrete on it's own is an extremely brittle material, this is what does the majority of the load bearing, and what allows this bridge to be able to support a load above.
Fortunately, we had our weekend houseguest as helper for this pour. Unlike the foundation slab where we could just dump concrete from the mixer into the wheelbarrow and then into the form, the height of this one meant we had to shovel concrete from the mixer into five gallon pails to be hoisted up and dumped. It slowed the process down considerably, and between that and a hot sunny day, we were thankful for another set of hands to speed things along.

Another few hours worth of waiting on concrete to cure and finishing work, and a few days wait before we removed the supporting formwork, and the last of the boring bits are complete. There's something really exciting about bridge slabs like this, maybe because there's always just a little bit disbelief that it's actually going to hold itself up. So far, so good :)

So fast forward a couple of weeks, and here's the finished oven base, with the ceramic fiber hearth insulation in place on top of the bridge slab:


Almost ready to start laying bricks!
Eventually, the entire base will be covered with some sort of finish material and that opening will get some doors. Exactly what finish material I'll go with remains to be seen, but at this point I'm leaning towards a miniature version of the house, meaning cement board and corrugated steel with exposed faseners...

Big Progress on the Wood Fired Oven

It's FINALLY raining here, for the first time in what seems like at least a month, so I figured I'd take a minute to get you caught up with the wood fired oven project progress.

At my last check-in, we had dug and poured rebar reinforced footings and completed the formwork for the foundation slab. This bottom, structure-supporting slab is thick and reinforced with rebar and mesh, and it's an important yet fairly boring, non-rewarding part of the project.

Since I had calculated this slab was going to require close to a yard of concrete, it presented something of a dilemma. Based on way too much prior experience mixing bagged concrete by hand, I was SO not feeling the idea by-hand mixing the 35+ bags it was going to require, but when I called around to the ready-mix plant to get the price of having what's called a "short load" delivered, and then to the couple of on-site, small batch concrete delivery services I could find, the price proved to be just a little too outrageous to convince me we couldn't do it ourselves.
So, conceeding that we were in for another couple of adventures with bagged concrete mix, my next step was to call the local big box store and arrange to have this and all the other heavy stuff, ~65 80# bags of Quickcrete, 40 or so concrete blocks, and a bundle of 1/2" rebar, delivered to the house. All in all, it amounts to several tons worth of material that, to move by pickup truck and human power would have meant lots of driving and many exhausting trips. For $69, (any size) delivery seemed like a small price to pay, and it meant the driver could pull the pallets off the truck with his forklift and drive them right to my project site in the backyard. It was money VERY well spent.

On our next free Saturday, I towed home the largest gas powered concrete mixer our local equipment rental place had, and Boy and I got to work mixing and pouring:

This slab ended up taking forty bags of mix. Not the kind of thing you can dilly-dally at, since the clock starts ticking on concrete curing from the minute you mix the first bag and it's critical to get all of the material in place while it's still fluid enough to be screeded and trowled. The mixer I rented could handle three bags at a time and while it was a slightly frantic couple of hours, the two of us managed to get the job done. Huge props to Boy for hoisting all those #80 bags up into the mixer. And props to me for being the only girl I know of that can wheel a full load of wet concrete. Fortunately the farthest I had to go with it was around the corner of the patio.
Here's all of the material in place, screeded and waiting to stiffen up a bit:

A couple of hours worth of curing later, all trowled up nice and smooth:


The next step was stacking the concrete blocks (CMU's) to form the base for the countertop height slab that actually supports the oven. These got "dry stacked" meaning they're set without mortar in the joints, and not having the mortar there to act as a buffer meant getting everything perfectly level was fairly tricky. Even the ~1/16" variation in level of the foundation slab made a difference, and we ended up putting a bit of sand mortar mix under the block in a few spots, (basically concrete mix without any gravel) to get the first course nice and level.
After that, it was back to work mixing concrete, this time two bags at a time by hand in the wheelbarrow, to fill every other core of the CMU's with a stick of rebar embedded in each. The remaining cores we stuffed with empty Quickcrete bags and leftover gravel to prevent concrete from falling into them when we poured the upper slab:


The angle iron you can see in the top photo is to bridge the opening in the base that will eventually be covered by a door of some sort. Rather than buy these couple of pieces of steel, I repurposed part of an old metal bedframe. Yay for recycling!

So there you have it. The boring parts are almost done, I promise. Next up...building the form and supports and pouring the upper "bridge" slab.

Summer Project #1 Commences: Wood-Fired Oven

Spring is finally springing...time to get outside and get started on some fun stuff!

I think I've spoken before about how I get antsy when I don't have at least a couple of house projects in the works. Fortunately, even at 3 years present and accounted for here at Modern in MN and despite what I would call a fairly steady rate of dispatch with all manner of projects and finish-ups, I'm still managing to maintain a page-long list of items on my agenda for both indoors and out.
This one's been burning a hole in my brain since last fall...or technically, I guess it's been burning a hole in my brain for the last ten years or so. It's one of the few things from my kitchen wish-list that I didn't manage to pull off, and while it's not happening indoors, as of this past weekend, I'm on my way to having my very own wood-fired oven on the patio.

I'm following the downloadable instructions and friendly advice available at fornobravo.com, for the Pompeii oven and I can almost taste the deliciousness that shall (hopefully) issue forth already. Pizza anyone?

On Saturday, Boy and I got busy running our trusty shovels, stripping the sod and leveling a ~6' x 7' area next to our patio in preparation for footings and a foundation slab. It doesn't sound like much, but we've got crazy hard clay soil and it was slow going, that digging business. Once again I found myself insane with jealousy over those warm climate places where the work and expense of 48" frost footings would be unnecessary.
Anyway, fast forward about a half day's worth of dirt and sod moving, and another half day with the post hole digger and some bagged concrete mix, and we've managed some footings to support the 6" reinforced concrete slab upon which the actual oven project will commence.


On Monday I spent a couple of hours with power tools and a hammer and got the formwork set. Now it's just a little more sand and gravel and finding some more free time and we're ready to pour, and THEN the fun begins!


In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I'm not exactly doing things by the cold-climate building book. I made the executive decision to take a shortcut with the foundation and (perhaps stupidly), I'm proceeding from here with fingers crossed. What should have happened is a full 48" depth block or poured wall perimeter foundation, but that would have been expensive from a materials standpoint and extremely time consuming to excavate by hand. I'm hoping that the post footings we've poured combined with the super thick, extra reinforced slab with decent drainage will do the job.