Pizza Oven Weekend

Last Christmas my dad received this book from my Aunt - which I think was a not so subtle hint that she was expecting many fresh pizzas during future visits.

But my dad and I have been steadily progressing this year with building a pizza oven in their backyard. This has required a lot of heavy lifting and has taught me that I can actually lay bricks and that my dad and I work pretty well together.

We were hoping to have the main dome finished this weekend but rain set in and put a stop to our work. So we've got about 2 rows of  bricks left before we can use it as an actual pizza oven.

Saturday morning did not start off well. It had rained all night and didn't look like it was clearing up any time soon. Still - at least the view was nice.

The pizza oven was where we left it last time we worked on it. The arch had been completed and we had done three rows of the dome. But with a giant hole in the top our oven was still more of a fire pit. Dad and I crossed our fingers that the rain would clear and had a cup of coffee in the meantime.

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Mum's garden was enjoying the rain more than we were.

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When the rain cleared up we managed to get another row of bricks on the oven. The next stage is a bit more fiddly. Now that the bricks are hanging over the gap, there is too much gravity working against them so the mortar won't hold it up.

We placed a slat of mdf on some buckets and used a weak mortar to make a false dome that would hold up the rest of the dome.

This would usually take about an hour to dry, but with the weather it didn't look promising.

We prepared for more rain over night and crossed our fingers again for sunny weather on Sunday.

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Hooray! A promising sight for a days work.

The top of the dome is probably the most fiddly of all the work we've done. Each brick now needs to be cut to size in order to fit in the gap left by the last brick.

Dad working on cutting each brick to size. This process took a while and slowed us down considerably.

So this is about as far as we got by Sunday lunchtime when it started to rain again.

There is only a little hole left to fill up at the top and we will have the inside dome ready for firing. Stay tuned for the next update.

Mum's nosy chickens.