Up go the walls!

I am a week behind. The past two weekends I have been able to get a lot of work done. The walls are standing and my son is using the current state of my outdoor kitchen as a garage for his bike and toy car.
The original layout and my design came together very nicely. Besides the Oven I decided on only one BBQ spot. No Side burner or heating drawers. It would look too crowded and take away from the actual reason why I am building this thing in the first place, my pizza oven.

Now to the actual build and the things I learned. Dry stacking cinder blocks is great. It allows you to really move along and pull those walls up in no time. My cement floor even (enough) for an easy stacking of blocks. I drilled 20 holes in the cement for the vertical rebar. With the help of a Hammer Drill it was an exercise that only took minutes.

Mistakes became immediately apparent. First, I ordered way too many cinder blocks and not nearly enough cement mix to fill them. Second, in an effort to tie the blocks together I included horizontal rebar after the first layer and before the last. To that end I had bought pre-cut open face cinder blocks. I wanted to only fill the holes where there was vertical rebar. Well, cement is wet and goes into all the nooks and crannies it can find, hence it moved into the non-rebar places and gave me a Roy Sheider moment: "We are going to need a bigger boat" only that I drove back to home depot for more bags of cement. 46 bags to be exact. Holy cow - I poured 46 - 60lbs bags of cement mix into the cinder blocks. This thing is not going to go anywhere, ever!

The one tool I didn't have was a big enough masonry saw. I had hired a helper and his brother let me borrow his. Lucky break, because that little thing I had would have slowed me down considerably. All in all it took me a day and a half to put up the walls and enclosures for the oven. The surprise of the weekend was that I spent a considerable amount more on cement than I did on the cinder blocks. That didn't even occur to me before I started. Well that's a layman for you :)

I loved standing next to the walls at the end of the day and feel the heat coming off the curing cement. Gave me a sense of accomplishment. Not bad for an old dude who pushes paper for a living.