HOA made me move my oven... final project photos

[phippsj]

Re: HOA made me move my oven... final project photos

I also have a sloped yard, so the path to my backyard goes up two "tiers", with limestone block walls. To get the electric and water to the site I had to tear down those walls and put them back up again. Not a lot of fun!

The first photo shows those tiers. Turns out the ground underneath was 4" of dirt, then pure limestone as well. I had to rent an air hammer and chisel out limestone to reach the 12" of line depth required.

The final picture is the view from our kitchen window area.

I still need to figure out the pergola or patio cover. I would LOVE a groin vault, even better brick like a Catalan roof (I used to live in Barcelona and fell in love with those brick ceilings). Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any masons here who are confident they can built that type of a structure. So, I may try to replicate in dark cedar...

Anyways, its been a fun adventure so far and I am really anxious to get this thing wrapped up. Its been a 2 year journey at this point.

[phippsj]

So, long story short (over the past two years), is that my HOA made me move my oven about 25 feet across my yard. I had permissions originally, and it had been in place for a year, but never underestimate the power of an HOA. The first picture shows the general area of the two sites. The first is the back right area of the photo, the bottom left is the second (new) location of the oven.

So, I poured the completed patio and established the new site for the oven, and then made some design changes on the stand (two storage areas with a horizontal divider... very happy with that versus the single "cave" I had with the original design). I then took the old 42" oven apart brick by brick, labeling each with a course/position number. I then reassembled the oven on the new stand, and transferred my original metal framing / cement board to the new oven. Pictures make the framing look a bit worse than it was, but I will admit I was concerned. However, the end result came out just like he promised... straight edges and far better than I could have hoped to have done on my own.

I was going to rebuild the framing, but a friend of mine is a mason and convinced me that he just needed a rough form to work from. So, here are the build and finish pictures of that process.