Rocko's Build Log

[texman]

I talked things over with my wife and decided the smoker is indeed excessive. I really would make better use of a surface cooker of some kind. I need something that would handle me boiling wort for homebrew. This means a surface that can sustain ~60 pounds of weight in a pot, and can handle gas. I would love to be able to migrate between gas and charcoal at the same time. Any ideas?

In other news, we decided not to do strips of concrete for steps out to the main pad. Instead, we'll just go with a lot of gravel and a rock dry creek bed. This is a modification of the original idea my wife had. It should soften up the look of everything. The strips with the outdoor kitchen was going to be a bit ridiculous. I am amused how much we are landing back at our original thoughts, but with just some modifications. I originally wanted to just build around the existing slab, but it would have really closed in things. My wife wanted a dried creek bed, but it was awkward with so much grass around it.

For a "surface Cooker" on gas, and i would suggest Natural Gas if possible, consider the largest size of the vessel that you would use there. the weight is fine as long as the structure you place the burner is adequate. I would go dual burner as well, if possible. i don't know of anyway to go back and forth from charcoal to gas without a lot of mtnce. Charcoal is easy though, can be free standing built in, whatever you want.

[texman]

I decided due to all the gradient changes that the skirt for the slab is almost right on the ground around the oven, so this means I can extend it out a little bit and accommodate a larger oven. So I went out to extend the perimeter some more, and found out it was already 80 inches. Up from 72. Up from 64. I think I've done this two times already!

The goal was to do a 42" but if I'm dropping out the smoker, I want a little reserve capacity, so I may go back to 48". I can concede that anything larger is an encumbrance. I had this argument here before about not going so large, but I do know my ~36" was too small. I also suspect I'd end up using the same amount of wood in my 48" as my 36" because that old oven had a tall, shallow mouth for its size and was a refractory clay thing. So I'm probably already psychologically ready to feed a 48" oven. Maybe. I guess we'll see.

I like that you have extra room, that is an advantage to your build. And yes, that is a HUGE OVEN. But it is yours. I have a 36" and only have it full when smoking. i have never cooked more than 1 pizza at a time, but i dont have a team to build them either. I would suggest one thing on the WFO that i would do different, i would make the dome a bit lower for more even heat i think. Are you building a brick WFO? An oven that size will weigh 10-12k pounds. Are you going to igloo or enclose?

[Rocko Bonaparte]

I like that you have extra room, that is an advantage to your build. And yes, that is a HUGE OVEN. But it is yours. I have a 36" and only have it full when smoking. i have never cooked more than 1 pizza at a time, but i dont have a team to build them either. I would suggest one thing on the WFO that i would do different, i would make the dome a bit lower for more even heat i think. Are you building a brick WFO? An oven that size will weigh 10-12k pounds. Are you going to igloo or enclose?

I rarely tried to do more than one pizza at a time, but I'd cram it full of stuff to bake/roast at once. I'd like to actually lower the dome height, but that dome calculator on the forums assumes a uniform radius. I was still pondering trying to monkey with the math to allow me to scale it down as I went.

It will be a brick oven. I'm going for an igloo. Weight-wise, the base of the oven is going on 12 inches of concrete and the area around it is getting some extra concrete. I think they're making that area 6 inches.

[Rocko Bonaparte]

This has been real slow going. They finally got the rebar in although the forms still aren't complete. I am finding the result unsatisfactory based on things I read here some concerns:
1. Rebar goes right to the perimeter of the forms, which means they will likely be exposed after pouring.
2. Rebar put straight on the ground instead of slightly suspended by rocks or something non-ferrous.
3. Where it is suspended, it is actively tied into the ground with rebar. I thought I read it here, but doesn't this basically cause something like an electrolysis that eventually disintegrates all the iron inside the concrete?
4. They haven't finished the forms.
5. They ripped the cover off my outdoor outlet
6. They left a charger randomly
7. They threw--actively threw--a roll of rebar into a far-removed section of the yard that we weren't mowing to foster some wildflowers
8. The section they finished for the walkway required a bend that the ended up cracking. So there are splinters of wood in that part of the form.
9. They didn't drill into the existing slab and extend rebar--as the contractor had promised even without my prompting.

Attached is what the back yard section looks like right now. The pour is supposed to happen Thursday, and the guy's coming to see it Monday. Unless they do some major work Tuesday and Wednesday, that ain't happening. I'm tempting to make the fixes myself and take it out of what I owe him.

[agrasyuk]

Do insist on work done and redone properly, but if forms are not yet done I'm not sure why you stressing about rebar on ground. Much easier to walk while working. If you going to insist on "taking it out of what I owe them" chances are good that you will find few unpleasant surprises left in for you in the work.

what this comes down to is - "they". I'm guessing that there is a possibility that at least some of the contractors are responsible tradesman that take pride in work well done. But so far I didn't meet to many of that kind. Hence "want things done right- do it yourself" is how I go about life. Your expectation of "they" caring about stuff like your wild flowerbed is either strange or naive.

Good luck with your project!

[Rocko Bonaparte]

They are correcting a lot of it. They'll be propper up the rebar when they're actually pouring. That's fine. I was surprised they didn't know about the problems with connecting all the rebar with ones staked into the ground, but they'll be correcting it.

I suspect I will have to be really aggressive with them on pour day, which looks like it'll be this Thursday.

[Rocko Bonaparte]

To think of something more pleasant, does anybody have any experience with building most of their outdoor kitchen out of treated wood? My wife is thinking she'd prefer the shaping of that. We would build the pizza oven using concrete blocks because of the weight, but we could sustain wood for much of the rest. It would be cheaper and generally easier to work with. However, I fear weathering issues even with treated wood.

On another topic, I'm wondering about grills and the like. We were thinking of getting a TEC 44" grill. If I didn't have the pizza oven, I'd probably get something a little less particular. The TEC uses a ceramic glass top heated by propane to very cleanly cook/sear stuff. It's pretty much 100% "taste the meat, not the heat." It can take regular old pans and the like too. I figured it would be nice to have something "clean" to complement the flavors and abilities of the pizza oven.

Apparently, the older TEC grills had problems maintaining low temperatures, but this apparently has been overcome; they can hold 200F at their lowest. They also don't go up to a gajillion degrees; they apparently can do 900F and do it quickly, but not much more. Some really passionate steak people apparently care about this and want their stakes zapped at 1400F.

[Rocko Bonaparte]

Busy day today.

I recall reading somewhere never to attach a new concrete pad to a pool (with rebar and all). It'll separate and you'll have to deal with that, but it is better than either party trying to move independent of the other and causing it to crack. Namely--the pool. Well, the crew here drilled in and died some rebar before I could catch them. I had told my contractor not to attach them, but that got lost in a month of farting around.

So should I be alarmed by this or be happy for it?

[Rocko Bonaparte]

They poured yesterday and I was checking it today. It was supposed to drain away from where the cabinets and the oven are going to be and instead flow along the side and also into a drain I had installed. It does the exact opposite. Not a drop of water reaches the drain and it all flows towards the pizza oven and cabinets. All I can think to do now is to basically etch a drain into the slab right in front of all the cabinets and have that run off to the side. It's that or obliterating all of this and basically starting over. I'm extremely unimpressed with either option but I will at least give the contractor a fighting chance to explain himself. He knew all of this--repeatedly.

The walkway also has some divots in it.

Update: I guess he just heard "pizza oven" and just tried to manage that, despite me going on and on and on about "outdoor kitchen," "cabinets here," and having plumbing and electrical sticking out of the ground.

It looks like I would also have build an elevated base for the cabinets anyways but now I have to set up channels through that.

[jonv]

Sounds familiar. I also had some 'help' pouring my slabs and now have corrective work to do. I will raise the level of my cabinets to keep water out.

I also had the builders start to put up the gazebo that covers the whole area - except that the timber was poor quality and the workmanship worse - in the end I had them cut it down and scrapped it. All very annoying.

Oh well, if you want a job done properly etc....

[Rocko Bonaparte]

Sounds familiar. I also had some 'help' pouring my slabs and now have corrective work to do. I will raise the level of my cabinets to keep water out.

I'm looking into pouring out additional concrete in the profile of my cabinetry such that the toe-kick would basically be concrete. I'm trying to understand the implications of this. For one, I am checking the height of refrigerators that are typically put in outdoor kitchens. I don't think they normally factor in having a toe-kick, which means I'd have a problem there. The side where I planned to install that run along the grade so water wouldn't normally want to pool there, but I'd rather still have some protection.

This extra layer would also let me mess with all my plumbing to get them into the exact spots I need. Finally, I should be able to get some rebar poking out for the pizza oven.

I apparently am horrible at calculating concrete needs because I keep estimating something like 25+ bags of concrete to do this if I was assuming everything was a flat 3-4 inches when people eyeballing it are thinking more like 15. Maybe somebody can look at this with me. I have about 11 linear feet one way, which bends for another 12, then about 5 more feet--give-or-take. The pizza oven itself has something like an 8x8 profile at its largest, although maybe more like 6x6; that's partially factored into my linear feet so I give it a fudge factor of another 5 linear feet.

So I'm doing (11 + 12 + 5 + 5) * 2.5 * .25 = 20.625 cubic feet with this particular method.

In practice, I'd use this toe kick to try to level things and factoring in the grade will somewhat reduce the bags. I'm not going to take this number out to tscarborough so nobody worry. I'll go outside and mark out the profile of everything with my wife, hem and haw, cry, cheer, and live out a thousand possibilities of our futures together before we capture the final numbers. I also have to factor in the bags of concrete for the oven's pad and filling int concrete blocks with the stuff.

[jonv]

You're right about the refrigerators - standard worktop height here is 900mm but I'll have to raise that a few inches to fit appliances - might even be a more comfortable working height...

[Rocko Bonaparte]

The fridge we were thinking of installing has a cutout height of 34.5 inches aka ~880mm so it doesn't really work with a toekick. At any rate, I re-re-redid the math with my wife and still came up with lots of bags of concrete. If it came up to 40 80lb bags of the stuff, I had a mixer that could do 2 bags at once, and it took upwards of 5 minutes to mix, then I'm looking at 100 minutes of just dealing with that. TBH I think that is doable, but I'm still having to work around the fridge and all that.

[Rocko Bonaparte]

Does anybody have an opinion on doing the base of an outdoor kitchen--excluding the pizza oven--using 16x8x4 blocks? I assume I would need some vertical rebar for them. I plan to use full-width blocks for the pizza oven itself, but I wanted to try thinner blocks for the counters and rest of the kitchen.

[rodeair]

I used 6x8x16 blocks for my counter bases. Dry stacked and filled every other cell with concrete and a piece of rebar. Worked well, but sometimes a pain with measuring. Not sure if 4 inchers would be too small.