The first batch of mini adobe bricks are drying in the sun. I ended up making a form to make four 3″x4″x1.5″ blocks at a time. I wanted to start slow so I decided to make a small batch today. I sifted out the large pieces of clay with a 1/2″ mesh screen and mixed 1 3 gallon bucket of clay soil and 1 3 gallon bucket of sand in the wheel barrow. I used an 18 gallon plastic rubbermaid type container to mix the dry mix with water. I love the feeling of the mud squishing up between my toes. 🙂 I ended up getting 52 bricks with some mud left over for next time. I would have made more but I ran out of the boards I was making them on. There is probably enough clay for 8 or 10 more. In all reality if I make a batch like this every weekend I will be doing good. You wouldn’t think stomping around in mud would be that tiring. I was wiped by the time I was done though.

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.