Although the Forno Bravo site has a wonderful article describing this very topic of curing a pizza oven, I’ll explain a little bit here (with a couple of pictures of course).  If you read this post and still have any questions, I encourage you to go to this link.

The first question that you may ask is, “Why can’t I just let the mortar cure like normal concrete cures through air drying?”  The answer: When we build the oven, we added a lot of moisture.  In the mortar, in the hearth, etc.  No matter how long we let the oven sit, there will always be moisture that remains.  If we fire up the oven to 1000 degrees without driving that moisture out of the oven, it could cause cracks to form.  That, of course, is what we want to avoid.

To cure the oven, I started with a small fire.  Ideally, on day 1, you could maintain a temperature of around 300 degrees for about 8 hours.  It isn’t too bad if you have a weekend to just throw a log onto the fire every half hour or so.

Building the first fire in the pizza oven to cure the mortar.

I followed the same schedule that is outlined in the Forno Bravo link above. This schedule is:

• Day 1:  300 degrees for 6-8 hours
• Day 2: Repeat at 350 degrees
• Day 3: Repeat at 400 degrees
• Day 4: Repeat at 450 degrees
• Day 5: Repeat at 500 degrees

There are a few different ways to measure the temperature.  Some people build probes into their oven and then link up to a thermometer.  This seemed a little much to me, so I use an infrared thermometer.  These can sometimes run upwards of $80, but I use a cheap infrared thermometer from Amazon.  It is less than $20 and has worked great.  You simply point the laser into the oven and voila!  Instant temperature reading.

Now I must admit, I did let the temperature get a little bit hotter than some of these temperatures.  It’s very hard to maintain an exact temperature.  I tried to keep it +- 50 degrees, but on my second day it accidentally got to 500 degrees for a short time (oops, got a little bit excited).  Fortunately, I didn’t develop any major cracks.  However, there were quite a few little cracks that developed throughout the curing process.  From what I’ve read, this is completely normal to see hairline cracks.  As long as there is minimal smoke/heat escaping, this is ok.

It is best to wait until you have put the chimney on to cure the oven. That is if you have the patience...clearly I didn't.

While curing the oven, I put a temporary chimney on to help draw up the smoke away from my head. And, I was super excited to see smoke come our of a chimney. It works! Woohoo!

If you have done all of the steps to this point (including the chimney, which I installed after I cured the oven – out of order with the logical process), then you now have a fully functional pizza oven. Go make some pizza!

Up next, I’ll cover the concrete countertop that I’ll be using on my pizza oven.

In fact, a chimney isn’t even functionally required for a pizza oven.  If a chimney wasn’t there, the door would serve as the chimney.  Cold air would enter the oven through the bottom of the door while the smoke and hot air would escape out of the top.  But, who wants smoke coming out of the front door when you are trying to make pizza?  Not only would the smoke make it difficult to see and breath, but it would leave black stains all over the front of the oven.

When thinking about putting a chimney onto the pizza oven, there are again a lot of things to think about.  Considering I have never built a chimney, I had to do a lot of research to understand what I was doing.  Some of the questions that I had were:

1. What material do I use for the flue?  Stainless pipe or clay flue?
2. How will I support the base of the chimney?
3. How does the chimney go through the roof without leaking water?
4. What prevents rain from coming into the chimney?
5. Since the chimney will get hot, do I need to insulate or brick around the chimney?  If so, what prevents water from seeping between the flue and the outside brick/insulation?

If you have any experience with chimneys, these questions may seem pretty dumb.  But I knew nothing.  So below is what I found.

Stainless or Clay Flue?

Ultimately, either a stainless pipe or clay flue works the same.  They both exhaust heat out of the oven.  It is the requirements other than the pipe that really make the difference.

First, let’s look at a metal pipe.  The metal pipe must be stainless steel.  A galvanized pipe will rust out from the exhaust fumes.  Also, the metal pipe should be double-walled.  A single wall pipe will get scorching hot and may have an effect on any sealants between the pipe and the roof.  To connect the pipe to arch transition, an anchor plate is needed.  After all is said and done, using a double walled stainless steel flue is expensive.  Here is an example of this double walled stainless flue pipe and anchor plate.  Once the flashing is included, you are looking at >$200 just for the chimney.  Despite the expense, however, a metal pipe is very easy to implement.  You mortar in the anchor plate, attach the pipe, and attach the flashing.  That’s it.

The other option is a clay flue.  Clay flue’s are dirt cheap.  I bought a 2 ft section for less than $10. However, they require a little bit more work.  A clay flue should be surrounded by brick leaving a 1″ air gap between the brick and clay flue.  Still, after including the brick, the cost is ~$30.

Between these two choices, I decided to go with an 8 inch by 8 inch square clay flue.

Chimney Support

As I mentioned above, a metal pipe will require an anchor plate.  For a clay flue, you can mortar the flue directly to the brick.

In either case, a transition will have to be created between the landing arch and the chimney.  To make the transition, I used my angle grinder to cut angles on bricks.  Once mortaring them into place, a flat and level area is created for the chimney flue to rest on.

Mortaring the custom cut bricks into place to transition the curved arch into the chimney.

Front view of the arch/chimney transition

Insulating the chimney

If choosing a metal pipe for a chimney, you should choose an double walled pipe.  For these pipes, there is no need to insulate around the chimney as they are already insulated.   Clay flues require brick to be laid up around the flue with a 1 inch air gap.

How to keep water out of the chimney?

Since I haven’t actually made it to the roof yet, I can only speak to what I have read.  Whenever I get to the point of putting on the roof, I’ll give an update on how I did it.  But, in the meantime…

There are a lot of gaps around the chimney for water to potentially invade.  First, there is the gap between the chimney and the roof.  To prevent water intrusion here, metal flashing is commonly used.  For steel pipe, you can buy these for the right diameter of the pipe.  For a clay pipe, you put the flashing into the brick exterior.  There are tutorials out there for flashing which are pretty helpful.

The other place that water can invade is between the clay flue and the brick.  Since there is an air gap, this could easily allow water to seep down the flue.  To prevent this, a concrete chimney cap is commonly poured in place.  During this pouring process, window seal insulation (the blue foam stuff) is wrapped around the clay flue.  After the concrete cures, the window seal insulation is cut down and the gap filled with high temp silicone sealant.

The clay flue is mortared into place on top of the arch brick transition.

Alright, now that the chimney is in place, I have a working pizza oven!  It may not be protected from all of the elements yet.  It may not look extremely appealing (in fact, a little redneck at this point).  But, it works!  But before firing it up to full temperature, it will need some smaller fires to cure it.  I’ll update you soon on how to cure the oven.

Here are both of the 275 gallon heating oil tanks that were leftover in the basement.

While these tanks were clearly still in pretty good shape, they weren’t doing us much good with our electric furnace.  Ideally, we would get these tanks out of our basement.  But how?  And would they fit up the stairs?  These were the big questions that were running across my mind.  Whenever I have such questions that I am pondering, there is one resource that I know will be able to answer it.  My dad.  So I called him up for some help and he arrived with his pipe wrenches and sawzall.

When I first started thinking about removing these tanks, I had a brilliant idea. Let’s use the sawzall to cut them up into pieces to make them easy to carry!  But then Lara raised a valid point.  Couldn’t this create sparks which would ignite the fuel?  Hmm, she did have a point.  Although heating fuel doesn’t ignite like gasoline, it was best to avoid the possibility of blowing up our house.  Sooo, that idea went out the door.

When my dad arrived, we brainstormed for a bit.  Is it possible that these tanks would fit up the stairway?  After some thoughts, we concluded that carrying this thing up the stairs was our only option.  One way or another, we were going to get these tanks up that stairway!

The fuel tank removal began.  First thing was first.  Drain all of the fuel out of the tanks.  At ~7lbs per gallon, we needed to drain as much fuel as possible.  These tanks were going to be heavy enough being empty.  After draining every last ounce that we could get, we collected about 8 gallons.  That made the tanks about 50lbs lighter.  Every pound was going to count on those stairs!

Once the fuel was drained out of the tanks, it was time for demolition.  No, we weren’t going to saw the tanks (due to the possibility of blowing ourselves up).  Instead, we cut on the pipes above so that we could remove them.

My dad doing his best demolition work. He is using his sawzall to cut away the pipes entering the tanks.

Once we removed all of the pipes from the tanks, it was time to haul them up the stairs.  Let me assure you this was no easy task. My dad was pulling from the top while I was pushing from the bottom.  Since the tank was tilted at such a high angle, all of the undrained oil settled right above the drain plug.  We had this bright idea to plug the drain hole with a paper towel.  This worked brilliantly…until the paper towel got knocked out.  Oil came pouring out onto the wood stairs (only a pint, but that pint of oil sure does linger).  I worked frantically to re-plug the paper towel while at the same time trying to keep this fuel tank from crashing down the stairs on top of me.  I’m sure that was a sight to see!

After a couple of our mishaps, we got both tanks up the stairs with not even an inch to spare.  What is one to do with two old fuel tanks, you ask?  Craigslist, of course!  It turns out that this guy named John (a great old guy from the city) has been looking for tanks like this for the past year.  He wanted to make a barbecue grill out of them.  Who knew?

The fuel tanks from basement are now stacked neatly waiting on John to pick them up.

I’m sure you’ll love what happens next.  Now that the tanks were outside, there was a big problem remaining.  All of that oil made our house wreak of oil smell.  With Lara being pregnant, there was no way that she should be breathing all of those fumes.  Luckily for everyone, Lara and my mom went out shopping for the day.  This gave my dad and I a chance to air out the house a bit.  What comes next was a bit comic.

In our house, we have a huge attic fan.  This fan will suck the air right out of our house in no time (great in Summer to bring in the cool night air!).  Oil smell?  That attic fan will take care of that!  So we flipped on the switch for the fan.  Now, you can see from the picture above that it was cold outside.  Therefore, as we always do in the winter, our wood stove was burning inside to keep the house cozy.  There was a key step that we left out when turning on our attic fan.  We didn’t open any doors.  The next thing we knew, our house was full of smoke.  Since no doors were open, the only option for air to enter the house was through the chimney!  Doh!

Hurriedly, we ran to open some doors.   For the next 20 minutes, we shivered as the oil fumes and the smoke left our house while the sub-freezing outside air entered our house.  As soon as the air was clear, we finally shut the doors.  Our house was down to 50 degrees!

Soon after this, Lara and my mom get home.  You can guess the first thing they said.  ”Why is it so cold in here?”  You just can’t win…

It is March now, and the rays are warming the ground here in Ohio.  Yes, that is the signal for me to emerge from my cave…my basement.  Maybe I am not a bear, but I sure felt like one this winter.  Why, you ask?  Here is my backstory.

My Reason for Hibernation

Winter in Ohio is dreary.  During the day, gray clouds linger.  And night is…well…dark.  As soon as 6:00pm rolls around, darkness arrives.  And wouldn’t you know it that I don’t get home from work until after 6:00pm.  Are you getting the picture that I’m trying to paint?  No?  Well since I’m not much of an artist (that’s Lara’s job), here’s what I’m trying to say:  I rarely see the daylight in wintertime and am cooped up inside my cave all winter long.

Due to these winter facts that I describe, I had a major goal in mind 3 months ago when winter arrived:  Get every last inside chore/project finished before Spring comes roaring like a lion.  When Spring arrives, I will not be stuck inside finishing projects like I did last year (*cough cough* cabinets and wood floors).  This Spring, I am going to have fun.  Fishing, hiking, and anything else that I can find to enjoy the Spring weather is a must do this year. So in the depths of winter, you could find me inside of my cave swinging hammers, playing with electricity, and throwing paint.  All with one goal on my mind:  Spring Fun!!

Now that you know why I have been hiding since my last post, it is time for you to see what I have been doing.  As I hinted in the title, we decided that the big project of the winter was to finish our basement.  Why the basement?  That requires some more backstory (I know what you are thinking.  Another backstory?  That’s two backstories! Hey, I’ve been hibernating so I have a lot to fill you in on.)

Why our house needed more space this Winter

When we bought our house, we went with the standard 3 bedroom house/2 bath house.  That seemed like the perfect amount at the time.  One bedroom for us and 2 extras.  Plenty of rooms, right?!?  But in the months/years since we have lived here, two major events occurred that turned these 3 bedrooms from completely adequate to “we need more space!”.

Event #1:  Lara started her stationery business. Since we didn’t have any other spare rooms under fancy names such as study, den, etc., we converted one bedroom over to an office. Now we were down to 2 bedrooms.  At the time, that was all fine and dandy.  After all, we still had a bedroom for our ourselves and for a guest (see:  mother/mother-in-law).

Event #2:  This past December, Lara and I found out that we are having a baby!!!  Exciting! Woohoo!  But wait…then one bedroom will be the nursery, one the office, and one our bedroom.  Where will guests sleep? Or what will we do when we have 2 kids?  The answer: we needed more space.

Three options for adding space to our home

Ok, we needed more space.  But where was that space going to come from?  Here were our options.

Option #1:  buy a new house.  This would be a great option. If…we didn’t already like our current house.  If…we had the money to buy a bigger house. If… If… If…  As you can see, this option just isn’t practical for us right now.

Option #2:  build on an extension to the house.  While this would allow us to stay in our home, there were some major drawbacks.  It would be expensive, it would take a lot of time (and expertise), and our house isn’t exactly laid out very well for an addition.  Any addition to our home would just seem strange and probably look out of place.

Option #3:  finish the basement.  Luckily for us, we ready had the extra space that we needed.  In our basement.  We just had to polish it up a bit.  And by a bit, I mean a lot.  Ultimately, this option won.  The cheapest, easiest, shortest, and most practical solution.

In the upcoming posts, you’ll see the transformation where we added 300 square feet to our home for under $1000.

And for a peek preview, here is where we started…

This is a view of our basement before we finished it. And this is after we ripped up the old dingy carpet!

So, despite this lack of decision making ability that we seem to have acquired, we have finally made our decision on the style of our pizza oven. We will be building a flat roof enclosure housed with brick on the outside. Also, there will be a countertop along the front of the oven made from concrete.

The enclosure will serve two purposes.  First, it will hold in all of the insulation that will be placed around the oven dome.  Second, it will keep rain and snow from the dome.

Choosing the Enclosure Materials

When building the enclosure, there is one important thing to remember.  We are dealing with fire and an oven that will reach 1000 degrees.  Therefore, anything that can burn (wood studs, etc.) should probably be avoided in order to keep this thing safe.  To build an enclosure around the dome, a common material is to use metal studs which are then covered in a board such as durock or hardibacker.  Therefore, that is what I have done.

1. Metal Studs (8 ft):  15 @ $3.11 = $47
2. Box of self drilling screws: $7
3. Box of tapcon screws: $5
4. Hardibacker (3×5): 6 @ $11.27 = $68

Total for the enclosure: $127

Total for materials so far: $932

Building the Enclosure

The enclosure will consist of metal stud walls.  These walls are very similar to walls built in a standard framing project.  Each of the walls have a base plate, a top plate, and studs spaced 16″ on center.

Each of the baseplates should be fastened to the hearth using tapcon screws.  I had never used these before, but they were pretty easy to do.  Just drill a hole with a masonry bit a little bit deeper than the screw is long.  Then the screw goes right into the concrete just like a drywall screw goes into drywall.

Screwing in the base of the enclosure walls with the blue tapcon screws.

Building the walls are relatively simple, but time somewhat time consuming.  I had to cut the metal studs with my tin snips (I’m thinking that there is there a better way…).  How high should the walls be?  For me, I will be putting 6 inches of insulation over the dome.  Therefore, I made my walls to be 6″ higher than the top of the dome.

The finished metal stud walls for the pizza oven. Also, landing arch is now in pieces after I tore it down.

When I first put up the walls, they still felt a little bit wobbly.  That is completely normal though.  As soon as the hardibacker gets screwed onto all four sides, it will be rock solid.

Buttressing the Arch

In my post on finishing up the dome, I talked about how my original landing arch had failed due to my lack of buttressing the sides.  Since I am building a metal stud enclosure, I have decided to buttress the side of the arch using the metal walls.  Ultimately, all of the outward force of the arch will be transferred to the tapcon screws that are holding the wall in place.  It probably would have been a better solution to either build a masonry buttress or put rebar into the hearth, but this wall/tapcon solution should hold up.  I’m not planning on putting a whole lot of weight on the arch.

To provide extra support, I put another piece of metal stud angled against the vertical stud (seen in the above picture).  This should help to prevent the vertical wall stud from buckling (I don’t think it would have anyway, but better safe than sorry!)

Also, since this oven will be getting really hot, I thought to myself:  ”If this metal stud is going to directly contact the brick, it is going to get red hot and bend like a wet noodle.”  Now, in actuality, this metal stud would never get that hot.  But, just to be safe, I put some vermicrete between the brick and the metal stud to provide some insulation from the intense heat.

The metal studs are helping to buttress the base of the arch. The vermicrete between should help to keep high heat away from the metal studs.

Now that both sides of the arch are supported, I can rebuild the arch without fear of collapse.

That is the start of the enclosure.  The beginning of the end.  Next up?  The chimney!  I think I have been talking about doing this chimney for quite a while now, but these problems just kept getting in the way.  Now that the arch is properly supported at the base, I can start adding the weight of the chimney on the top without worrying about it collapsing.

There are so many options to choose from.  Igloo style or enclosure?  And if it’s an enclosure, is it a flat roof or gabled roof?  Metal roof, shingled roof, or rubber roof?  Stucco or brick?  Countertop or no countertop?  Ahh, soo many decisions!  I wish we could just switch how it looks from one day to the next.  Unfortunately though, whatever we decide is pretty permanent.  It will be set in stone (or brick, or stucco, or…you get the idea).

So, how do we want this thing to look?  I think we’ve looked at about 200 different pizza oven pictures trying to decide on our final design.  I’ll give a run down of the top 10 oven designs that we have pondered over.

So, which one of the below ovens do you like best?

The Igloo Styles

The igloo style is cool in the sense that it shows off that awesome dome that took so much time to build.  I feel like it gives more of that true Italian countryside flavor.  Even within the igloo designs, there are so many options to go with.

#1: An Igloo version of a pizza oven. The igloo is covered in bricks.

#2: A mosaic option for the igloo. An option that we thought about for .002 seconds. That looks like it would take waaayy too much time.

#3: The chicken likes this plain stucco igloo oven with brick on bottom

#4: Igloo stucco oven with stone veneer bottom

Flat Roof Style

The enclosure type (including the gabled style) would offer better protection from the elements (rain and snow) if you get much of that.  It is really a completely different look than the igloo style, but still very cool.

#5: Stone veneer all around with tile countertops and concrete flat roof.

#6: Brick all around, squared off with brick counter.

#7: A brick exterior painted white

Gabled Roof Style

#8: Gabled shingle roof with brick all around

#9: Gabled slate roof with an old school whitewash stucco finish all around

#10: Stone veneer all around, concrete countertop and round chimney

So which one do you like the best? Vote at the top. I have my favorites, but I also view them with a different lens. I have to actually build it, so I just may lean towards those that I know I can build!

After I got up to row 7, the bricks are getting much more vertical.  When a brick is sitting more vertical, gravity wants to pull it right down.  This situation is where the indispensable tool is…indispensable.  Using the indispensable tool, I was able to hold each brick in place until the mortar set up just enough to hold the brick on its own.  As soon as the mortar could hold the bricks without using the tool, I moved on to the next brick.  Patience was definitely tested here!  For this reason, the top rows took longer than the bottom rows despite the fact that they had fewer bricks.

The indispensable tool helps to hold the higher level bricks in place until the mortar sets up.

Another problem when you start to get up higher in the dome is the “inverted V” phenomenon.  In the picture below, you can see where the bricks start to show the upside down V in the mortar.  The further up the dome you go, the worse the V gets.

The inverted V in the mortar is getting bigger as I get higher up in the oven dome

I suppose I could just leave the inverted V’s in place.  But if I’m going to build this dome, why not put a little extra time to make it better?  So I decided to get rid of these inverted V’s.  It was time to bring out the angle grinder…again.  To get rid of the inverted V, each brick has to be cut so that they fit together more tightly up the upper rows of the dome.  Below are the bricks for my 8th row of the dome.  After they are cut, the inverted V disappears.

Bricks were cut on angles for the 8th row and higher to get rid of the inverted V in the mortar.

This is really the process for each of the rows on up to the keystone.  Eventually, the gap closes and the angles get pretty tricky.  But at last, I made it to the keystone!

Looking through the entry arch into the complete dome, you can see the angled bricks in the top few rows.

Unfortunately, a series of unfortunate events has occured.  See, when I made it to the keystone, I was super excited and took lots of pictures.  Then I kept building and didn’t take the time to write up this blog post until later.   Over that time, I have lost my memory card with all of the final dome pictures!  It was a sad day when I couldn’t find that card.  It’s kind of like missing the climax to a movie!

Anyway, here is the only picture that I have before moving on.  It still shows the final dome with they keystone in place, but lacks detail.  I was able to stand, full body weight, on the top of the dome and it didn’t show any signs of giving way.

My lone picture of the finished dome. Notice the keystone sticking out the top holding the whole dome in place.

Landing Arch

The one thing you’ll notice on the above picture is the landing (the front arch).  I built the arch very similarly to how I built the entry arch into the pizza oven dome.  There was one major difference though.  In this arch, the smoke will be exiting through the top into the chimney.  Therefore, I had to leave a hole at the top of the arch.  How did I manage that?  The first 6 bricks on each side were whole bricks.  After that, I used bricks that were cut in half.  This leaves a hole 1/2 brick wide for the smoke to escape.

There was one problem (and it turned out to be a major one) with the design of this arch.  With an arch, all of the weight supported by the arch is transferred down and out towards the bottom of the arch.  If the bottom of the arch isn’t supported (called buttressing), the arch will collapse.  As you can see, I didn’t support the bottom of my arch.  When I put the chimney on top, the bottom of the arch started to ease ever so slightly outward.  You can already see small signs of this problem in the above picture.  The keystone brick on the arch has creeped down slightly.  I knew that once I started to put even more weight on the arch, the results wouldn’t be pretty.

Due to my lack of buttressing, I had to tear down and rebuild my arch.  I’ll show you the final solution along with the chimney transition in my next post.

Despite my little hiccup with the arch, this was a major feeling of relief!  The dome is complete!  And it is rock solid.

Ok, here we go.  It all started with move-in day.  February 5, 2010.  As luck would have it, this is the day that 15 inches of snow poured overnight.  Here in Ohio, it is quite the rare occasion to get this much snow at once.  But being super motivated, we didn’t let it phase us.  We even dug paths on the sidewalk with our trashcans (we still didn’t have snowshovels).

Moving into our house after a huge snowstorm. It kind of made it like a fairytale!

That is the start.  But really, my purpose here is to introduce you to the inside of the house.  You’ve already seen many parts of the outside of our house (to name a few, here is the backyard, chicken coop, patio, and pizza oven start).  Granted, we have shown a couple glimpses of the inside.  We built a rustic barnwood table for our dining room and built a dresser into our closet.  Also, Lara showed a little bit of our kitchen in her kitchen re-do inspiration.  But on the whole, the inside of our house remains a mystery.  Until now.

So, where do we start?  I suppose the kitchen is as good a place as any.  When we moved in, there was wallpaper…EVERYWHERE!  If there was a wall, it was covered in wallpaper.  This included the kitchen.

The kitchen when we first moved in with the flowery wallpaper and the old fridge. The cabinets were still stained oak.

Here is another wall covered with flower wallpaper. Also, the door was still blue at this point (later changed to white).

Just like every other room in our house, the wallpaper had to come down.  It was quite a job tearing the kitchen wallpaper down.  For some reason, drywall paper decided to come off with it.  Lots of fun!  After lots of sweat and tears (ok, maybe no tears), our kitchen turned yellow.

Here is the kitchen after we tore down the wallpaper and painted it yellow.

That paints a pretty good picture of our kitchen until now.  The strip wood flooring was in pretty nice shape.  It had oak cabinets that were stained slightly dark (which also made the kitchen feel dark).  The cabinet handles were brass colored when we moved in, but we painted them black.  That was mostly Lara and her love for spray paint.  She went on a spray paint binge there for a few months.  I’m thinking maybe she inhaled it one too many times!

Next up?  Our lovely dining room.  Berber carpet covered the floor of the dining room, much like the rest of our house.  We dated it from the late 80′s.  Apparently, Lara’s parents had the same carpet in their house.  20 years ago!  What other great features existed in the dining room?  First, a great surprise.  Wallpaper!  Second, there are the gloom and doom shelving that ran across the top of the walls.  We had no idea what to put on these shelves.  Maybe creepy dolls?

The dining room with the wallpaper, shelves up top, 1980's carpet, and the sweet (sarcasm?) chandelier.

Where are we now?  Ah yes.  The office decked out in pink carpet.  Actually, other than the pink carpet, the office was pretty nice.  No wallpaper to deal with!  It was one of only 2 rooms with no wallpaper.

Here is Lara's office with the pink carpet. This room wasn't in too bad of shape. If only the carpet wasn't pink...

Next?  Our upstairs bathroom.  One picture.  A thousand words.  Actually, I’ll keep it short of a thousand words.  But oh the words that I could use to describe it.  Unfortunately, you can’t see a severe problem in this picture.  Neither did we.  But there are huge problems lurking that we later discovered…

Our upstairs bathroom on our initial walkthrough of the house. Who's that lady?

Lastly, our favorite room of the house. Our great room. Fortunately, this room didn’t require a whole lot of intervention to bring it into the times. Wallpaper? Of course there was. Old carpet? Yep. But the huge windows, tall ceilings with wood beams, and the brick wall with the arch overshadows the bad things about this room. Definitely where we spend most of our time!

Our great room after we removed the wallpaper and painted the walls. The dogs approve!

The tall ceilngs, brick walls and arch, and the wood beams sold us on this house.

That’s our house. I mean, that was our house. Now? After a million labor hours later, it has a brand new look. And we’ll tell you all about it.

The very first layer was laid back before the arch was built.  From here on out, it’s row 2 and up. Throughout the dome building process, the indispensable tool is, well, exactly what it’s called.  Indispensable.  For the first 5 or 6 rows, the process is pretty straight forward.  Each brick is laid on top of the bricks below them at the angle that fits with the indispensable tool.

Using the indispensable tool to place each brick in the dome.

In the above picture, you can see the plywood that I put down on the oven floor to protect it from falling mortar.  This was absolutely necessary.  I think I ended up dropping more mortar on the wood than I put on the bricks! (slight exaggeration)

Once a brick was set into the proper place with the indispensable tool, I filled in the gap with high heat mortar (the recipe/instructions are here).  Initially, I started out placing the brick first, then trying to squeeze a bunch of mortar in between the brick and the row below it.  I quickly learned that this method was pretty difficult and tried something new.  My new method was to slop down a bunch of mortar (I eventually got the feel for exactly how much was needed), then put the brick on top of that.  Then I pounded on the brick with my fist to set it into place.  This worked much better required much less troweling.

As you can see below, it’s not exactly the best looking dome from the outside.  I cut a lot of my bricks in half with just a hammer and chisel.  This created rough edges on the bricks.  I didn’t worry about the look of the outside of the dome.  This will all be covered up by insulation later anyway.  However, on the inside, I made sure to keep it looking nice and clean.  When you pound down on the bricks, some mortar will ooze out the inside seam.  After letting it sit and dry for a few minutes, this can easily be scraped off and then wiped clean with a sponge.

Filling in between the bricks with homemade high heat mortar. It's not pretty, but it's all getting covered up in the end!

I started each row at the arch.  The last brick in each row is the “keystone” of that row.  I custom cut it exactly to fit the final gap, which happens to contain odd angles that meet the arch.  Initially, the bricks at the arch fit perfectly without having to cut.  However, as I moved up the arch with each successive row, the angles got more and more complicated.

A custom cut brick that transitions the dome and the arch. Only 1 angle is necessary due to the arch method of construction.

When laying the bricks, it is a good idea to minimize vertical seams.  It is best if the brick that is being laid bridges a seam on the row below it.  Anytime a vertical seam is present, it creates a weakness in the dome.

Row 5 of the dome. Take note of how I had to cut bricks sometimes to minimize vertical seams.

The highly anticipated arch to dome transition! The cutting here wasn't too extremely difficult.

This section of the dome was all about transitioning the dome with the arch. Other than the arch/dome transition bricks, the rest of this section was pretty simple. As I move higher up in the dome, things start getting a little bit more complicated. Gravity starts taking it’s toll and I also have to start cutting bricks in ways that I would prefer not to. So stay tuned…

Despite my extreme lack of expertise in bricklaying, I am going to make my first bricklaying experience a rather challenging one.  A freestanding brick arch.  Unlike my last arch to nowhere, this arch will serve as a gateway to a very important place…a place where many pizzas will be cooked to perfection.  The oven dome.  After I am finished with the entryway arch, I will then build the rest of the dome around the arch.

Just to keep a vision in your head as I go along, here is the final picture of what I am building.

The completed view of the entry arch into the pizza oven. The mortar is still wet at this point.

As much as I wanted to just dive right in and start building, there are a few planning steps that needed to be done first.

Choosing the Opening Size

There are a few things to balance when deciding on the opening arch width and height.  It’s really all about heat retention vs. ease of use.  Of course, to provide the best heat retention, there would be no door at all.  But this would make it pretty difficult to cook a pizza.  The bigger the door is, the more heat is lost but the easier the oven is to use.  If I ever want to cook a big roast or maneuver a wide pizza peel, a bigger door may come in handy.

With all of this said, there was a table in the forno bravo plans that I followed (with a slight modification).  Here was their recommendation:

• 36″ diameter oven:  Opening height of 10″ for a low vault design and 12″ for a high vault design.
• 42″ diameter oven:  Opening height of 11″ for a low vault design and 14″ for a high vault design.

I’ll get more into what a “low vault” and “high vault” is in the next post on building the dome.  But, for my pizza oven, I chose a high vault design.  Therefore, my final dimensions for my arch are 18″ wide by 11.5″ tall.

Preparing the Form

As nice as it would be to just throw some bricks up free handed, I decided to build a form to support the arch until I got the keystone in place.  On a piece of MDF, I traced out my arch design and then cut 2 identical pieces with my jig saw.  In between the two pieces, I sandwiched a couple of small 2×4′s to make the form wider.  This way, the form could support the bricks.

Laying out the bricks for the oven arch. Notice the spacers and the form that I am using to make this task a little easier.

After I made the MDF form, I needed some small spacers to keep all of the bricks evenly spaced.  You can see above that I laid the bricks around the form to measure how big the spacers would need to be.  After cutting the spacers out of plywood, they were ready to be put into action.

The First Dome Layer

I know, I know, this isn’t the arch.  But, building the first layer of the dome helps to support the base of the arch from the outward forces.  The first layer of the dome is unlike any other layer in the dome.  It is actually the easiest layer.  The bricks are laid as a soldier course.  This means that each of the firebricks (cut in half first) are stood up on end and wrapped around the outside of the floor.

Before setting the first row into place, I mixed up some of the homemade high heat mortar that I talked about in the last post on building the oven floor.  High heat mortar is then place in between each brick.

The first layer of bricks. Cut in half, stood on end, and wrapped around the floor of the pizza oven.

Cutting Bricks for the Arch

In a normal brick arch, bricks do not have to be cut.  However, in a pizza oven dome, the arch will need to interface with the curvature of the dome. What does this mean?  Each brick will have to be cut at an angle so that the inside of the arch actually follows the curvature of the dome.  This is called the arch/dome transition.

The arch/dome transition is traditionally one of the hardest parts of the pizza oven.  It usually begins to look pretty ugly with a bunch of crazy shapes being cut to merge the dome with the arch.  When browsing through the Forno Bravo forums, I came across this method below that pretty much blew all others out of the water in my opinion.  It ends up looking very clean and requiring no weird, wacko shapes being cut in bricks.

Each of the bricks had to be cut individually to interface correctly with the dome.  The indispensable tool (see mine here) is a tool that is commonly built to make the job of building a dome pizza oven easier.  It is critical in marking the bricks for cutting as you can see in the belowpicture.

Here I am using the indispensable tool to mark the cutting location on the bricks on the dome side.

Since each brick is uniquely cut, I numbered them so that I could correctly place them with the mortar.

The tricky part: cutting the bricks to the right shape for arch/dome transition. Here are all of the final cut bricks.

In the next post on building up the dome, you’ll see how these arch bricks begin to interface with the dome.  It’s pretty cool stuff!

Building the Brick Arch

Now that the first layer of bricks were in and the bricks are cut, it’s time to start building up the arch.  Since I had already laid out the dry run of the arch, I had a good idea of how this arch would shape up.  I think I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking here.

The first layer of brick for the dome helps to support the base of the arch

Since cement works by curing, we do not want to let it dry out before it has completely cured.  This is the same as concrete.  Unfortunately, firebrick absorbs a lot of water.  To prevent the firebrick from absorbing the water from the mortar and drying it out, it’s best to soak them in a bucket of water before using them.  They’re noisy too!  See all of the air bubbles being forced out of the brick?

Firebrick absorbs a lot of water. Soaking them stops them from absorbing water from the mortar.

The same picture as earlier. The keystone was custom cut to lock everything into place. Also, using a wet sponge on the front helps to keep the front face of the arch clean of mortar.

The final arch with mortar applied. It's not pretty, but it's functional!

This was a fun little project. Without any prior experience, I just built an arch that stands all by itself. I’m not going to lie, I was pretty excited when I removed the MDF form and the arch didn’t collapse. I can even stand on top of it and it holds me up!

The next step will be building the actual dome of the oven. Stay tuned.