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Well, I finally have concrete in the ground!
The location of my oven had to be dug out of a bank of loose dirt, and I'm making a curved brick retaining wall around it. The first pics show where I dug the foundation trench (about 400mm) and poured a footing. You can see the location of the wall with the first course in place, and how I'm cutting the bricks to fit around the curves nicely. I thought that it would be good practice for the dome. I'm going to do the first 3-4 courses double skin for strength.
Next I cleared some more shrubs out of the way and started to dig the foundation for the oven (bit rough with a hangover). I got a mate who is a concreter to help out, but we still found the quickest way to get the forms square was to loosely tack the boards together at the right widths with a couple of nails. Then it was just a matter of dropping them into the hole and getting the diagonals equal before getting the level right and staking the boards.
You can just see some holes cut in the plastic; I dug a row of piers down each side of the foundation for extra stability. After putting in some mesh, we used a laser to mark off the correct height on the inside of the forms, and we were ready to pour!
My cement mixer has now been in the family for 3 generations
so it was pretty noisy. After the first load I saw why my friend had wanted to start early, you need a lot more concrete than I realised for such a small slab. We ended up using about 1 ton of pre-mix and 8-9 bags of cement.
The location of my oven had to be dug out of a bank of loose dirt, and I'm making a curved brick retaining wall around it. The first pics show where I dug the foundation trench (about 400mm) and poured a footing. You can see the location of the wall with the first course in place, and how I'm cutting the bricks to fit around the curves nicely. I thought that it would be good practice for the dome. I'm going to do the first 3-4 courses double skin for strength.
Next I cleared some more shrubs out of the way and started to dig the foundation for the oven (bit rough with a hangover). I got a mate who is a concreter to help out, but we still found the quickest way to get the forms square was to loosely tack the boards together at the right widths with a couple of nails. Then it was just a matter of dropping them into the hole and getting the diagonals equal before getting the level right and staking the boards.
You can just see some holes cut in the plastic; I dug a row of piers down each side of the foundation for extra stability. After putting in some mesh, we used a laser to mark off the correct height on the inside of the forms, and we were ready to pour!
My cement mixer has now been in the family for 3 generations
so it was pretty noisy. After the first load I saw why my friend had wanted to start early, you need a lot more concrete than I realised for such a small slab. We ended up using about 1 ton of pre-mix and 8-9 bags of cement.
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