The Cob Oven: We Have a Base!

Now we're getting somewhere! The base is complete! This part was really intimidating at first but once I got going it was surprisingly easy. Do I have any experience laying brick you might ask? Nope! I watched a few youtube videos and called myself an expert. Most videos I watched seemed way too intense and technical. I figured I wasn't building a wall for our house or anything so I could probably wing it a bit more than most videos suggested. Here's what I did:

1. Filled up the hole with small drainage rock to ground level. (We bought a cubic yard for around $40 and our neigbour with a trailer helped us pick it up. If you have it delivered you pay around $120, yikes!)
2. Leveled out the rock layer as much as I could
3. Laid the first layer of brick directly on to the rocks and checked it with a level
4. Bricked and mortared up until I had used up all the brick (We spent about $25 on mortar)
5. Once the mortar had dried for 24 hours we filled the entire base with drainage rock

Is it perfect? Not exactly. But it sure is sturdy and it looks pretty good I think! 

Next up is the wine bottle and sawdust + building soil layer for insulation.  I actually did this already too but it was a total flop. I looked around for sawdust but most local hardware stores cut MDF and other non-hard wood so I didn't want that junk in with the sawdust. I ended up finding a giant bag of sawdust/shavings on kijiji for $10 but long story short, shavings are not good for this layer. Ugh. Ideally this layer would have dried hard but since my sawdust was more wood shavings it just dried as dirty wood shavings.

No big deal though! I'm just scooping it out and trying again with actual sawdust. I ended up contacting a packing company that a friend told me about and they said I could come by and pick up the sawdust later this week, yay!

In the meantime I'm in the process of sifting the building soil that I'll use to build the oven. Dave whipped up a sifter for me using some scrap wood and hardware cloth (you can see it in the top photo).

So that's where I'm at now! Not too bad! My goal is to have it done before Dave goes back to work in the fall.
I got this.