Given all of the drought we have had around here in the past few years I refuse to begrudge all of the rain we have been having. That being said, it has put the oven progress back. I had planned to make another load of bricks on Thursday but the clay and sand had both gotten wet and even after mixing it was too wet to work with. I covered the bin and let it sit till last night. The weather gurus weren’t calling for rain so I dumped it out on a sheet of plastic to dry out a little. Hopefully I will get another load of bricks made this weekend.
When I came home yesterday my almost dug hole looked like a pond. I fully expected to find tadpoles living in there this morning. I guess i wasn’t surprised given the almost 5″ we have had in the last 5 days. Fortunately it was down some by this morning. I bucketed out a bunch of the water and decided to use the post hole digger to dig 3 lower corners to help with drainage. The picture below shows the water that seeped in within about 30 minutes of digging.
My morning actually started with me putting together the wheel barrow I bought on the way home from work last night. My old one broke and it was time to replace it. About half a dozen loads of soil later and the hole was finished. I decided this was a good time to clean up and go get that load of gravel. The place I get it closes at 2pm so I had just enough time to get lunch and get the gravel. I noticed the sky was clouding up a bit as I was about to go inside so I decided to recover my brick mix on the plastic.
FF about an hour and my poor truck is once again dragging it’s back end. If it lives through this oven business it will be a miracle. Of course the sprinkles started as I started unloading the gravel. Glad I covered that clay/sand mix. Most of the time I was unloading the truck it poured rain. I really didn’t mind, it felt kind of good. Just about the time I finished, the rains stopped. I had hoped to have enough gravel to lay the cement pad this weekend. But I was a little short. It is really still to wet anyway so perhaps some time next week I can get that done.
