While looking for materials for my newest project I have become a big fan of Craigslist. Yesterday I hit the mother load. While doing a search for fire brick I located an elderly gentleman about an hour away with a truck load of old fire brick. He wanted $65 for the lot. While I only NEEDED a fraction of the amount he was selling (116+several halves and 14+several pieces of 12″x15″ slabs), purchasing what I would need new would have cost me about half of what I paid for the truckload and the quality would have been much less. So… after MUCH sweating and many trips to the back corner of his yard, my poor old truck was loaded to the gills and off we set. Thank God Tia went with me. I would probably still be carting bricks if I had to do it myself. Concerned that I would end up breaking down on the way home, we took it slow. My old truck has over 400,000 miles on it and she performed like a champ. Go Ford!

FF several hours and my truck has been emptied, we are exhausted, and two beautiful piles of Temper fire brick are awaiting duty. The question then became do I still build the cob/adobe oven or do I go ahead and build the oven entirely out of the fire brick. I checked the Pompeii plans and I do have enough for an oven larger than I had planned to build. Being the obsessing (aka focused) individual that I am, I found myself waking several times during the night to ponder my dilemma. This morning I decided to go ahead with the cob oven as planned with one alteration. I would build adobe bricks first and use those for the oven. The fact that I have never done this before and that in all likelihood we will move from here within the next 5-10 years, I decided to wait on building a ‘permanent’ oven and get my feet wet on the mud oven. I decided to go with the ‘build the bricks first’ approach after reading about an oven redo using such a procedure. It was written by the same gentleman that wrote the book I have been using as a reference for this project. Proceeding this way will allow me to build the bricks I need at my leisure and put it all together in a shorter time once I finish the foundation.

The totally cool thing about these bricks is that they came from an old boiler where I went to college. They have been sitting in this back yard since 1979, long before I was a student. Talk about coming full circle.

What does one do with 8 bags of tube sand and a VERY large pile of sticks? Build an earth oven of course. Also known as a cob or adobe oven by those who build and use them. They have been around forever and are recently coming into favor as a cheap way of making a wood fired oven. I ran into the idea while browsing the net this weekend. I’ve always wanted a brick oven and wasn’t willing or able to outlay the money required to build one or have one made. I read a post on some blog about cob ovens and instantly knew I HAD to build one. The basic ingredients are clay, sand, straw or manure, and lots of sweat.

So far I have located a source for the clay subsoil without having to dig up my yard. I have 8 broken tubes of sand that you put in the back of the truck during the winter for traction, a few bricks and a site picked out. Today when I came home, the city had cut down a couple of pear trees that lined the street and left the nicely cut wood in my yard. A couple of dozen trips with the dolly and I have next year’s wood all stacked up.

After reading Kiko Denzer’s book ‘Build Your Own Earth Oven’ that I picked up from the library on Saturday, I made a test brick using about half sand and half clay. I cannot believe how solid this thing is already. I can’t even make a dent with my fingernail. I also did the water test and it looks like the clay is fairly pure.

I think I am going to do a cinder block foundation surrounded by field stones. The foundation needs to be about 4′ in diameter. I am hoping to get this thing built before the end of the summer.