Watching concrete dry – boring!

Well, it’s been 4 days since we poured the slab. It’s so boring watching concrete dry. Actually, I’ve been kept busy wetting it down so it will cure properly. This slab is going to support more than a ton of weight, so it’s very important to ensure that it will be as strong as possible.

The other thing I’ve started doing is gathering materials for the next step. I love going to Home Depot and searching out stuff like mortar mix, angle iron, metal roofing and concrete block.

Here’s a couple of pictures of the piles of stuff I’ve accumulated so far.

Couldn't resist doing a quick mock-up of the oven's innards. This will have to keep me happy until the slab dries

More than 500 bricks. The yellow ones are firebrick for the hearth.

Concrete in the Hole

It’s Saturday, and we’ve passed a major milestone. The base slab has now been poured and there’s no going back.  Got up early today, ate a breakfast of Wheaties – breakfast of concrete champions – and got to it. I had purchased a very thick plastic bag that is sold as a way to mix concrete quickly and without mess. The initial plan was for me to be mixing one bag of Quikrete in the plastic bag while hubby mixed one or two bags of Quikrete in the wheelbarrow. We ended up doing all the mixing in the wheelbarrow one bag at a time. This wasn’t too bad because we ended up using only 14 bags of 60# Quikrete.  Vaughn worked the hoe while I poured the water in a little at a time. Then we both shoveled it into place. I tamped and worked the concrete around the sides to try to make sure there wouldn’t be any voids.

Here in Georgia, the weather has been quite hot as you can imagine it being in August. I was concerned that the first batches of concrete would start setting up before we could mix the last bags, so we used ice water instead of water right out of the hose. I had saved a big batch of icecubes from the freezer (could have bought a bag of ice) and I put those in a plastic grocery bag and tied the top closed. I wanted cold water, not chunks of ice, in the concrete.  The bag of ice went into a large cooler which I then filled with hose water. The cooler went on the tailgate of my truck and I siphoned off the water through a spigot on the cooler into some milk jugs that I used to measure the amount of water that went into each batch of concrete.  No contractor would have gone to this much trouble, but hey, that’s why I wanted to do this myself.

Base Slab poured and finished

Inside the slab I placed rebar along all four sides. After another layer of concrete, the welded wire mesh went in at approximately half the depth of the 6″ thick slab. After screeding the top and letting the bleed water subside, I started finishing with a metal float. I also went around the edges with an edger tool to round them off. Pretty good job for a girl!

Forms up !

Forms in, with gravel and reinforcing wire

Lots of progress to report from the last couple of days.

 On Friday, I installed the forms that I had constructed earlier in the week. I used 1×6 lumber and pre-cut stakes from Home Depot to make the form. Instead of installing the forms in place which is probably the usual way, I put everything together in my basement workshop. This way, I could get everything as square and tight as possible. I used screws to hold the pieces together suplemented with a few nails when I ran out of the right size screws. We had a couple days with rain earlier in the week and the form sat in the basement where it would stay nice and dry (and  unwarped) until it was time to put it in the ground.

Picture shows the form in the hole. I used an auger in an electric drill to excavate the holes for the stakes. The ground was just too hard to pound the stakes in without demonlishing them and wracking the forms. The drill worked like a charm and the stakes slipped into place with just a little pounding needed to seat everything firm and level.

Final step before pouring concrete was to “paint” the inside and top of the form boards with vegetable oil left over from my fryer. Last thing fried in this oil was scrumptious Vidalia onion rings. Maybe a good omen for future cooking in the oven   Oil on the boards will supposedly help keep the concrete from sticking too badly to the forms. I would like to try to re-use these same boards (trimmed to size) for the hearth slab in a couple of weeks.

First step – A hole in the ground

OK folks – so far my oven is just a hole in the ground. I hired two guys to dig this hole since our Georgia clay dirt is quite hard, especially since we’ve had less than normal rain this year. I had staked out the area ahead of time with puny sticks and string but it gave me a better idea of exactly how big the oven will be. This was great because now my husband believes that we two can pour the concrete slab ourselves!

Margarita-ville Sign

Sticks and String

Foundation Hole

Hello world!

Hello Brick Oven fans. As my first project after retirement, I wanted to keep a log of the progress as I work on a small wood-fired brick oven. I’ll be posting photos and talking about the various steps as I work my way toward (hopefully) some of the best bread on the planet or at least in my neighborhood.