| The
plans I used for the oven were based on the excellent
plans in The Bread Builders by Dan Wing and Alan
Scott. The main modifications to the plans in the book were because my oven is "recessed" into an existing retaining wall. I partly demolished the wall, rebuilt the side and back walls, and then built the oven into the cavity I had just created. The base of the oven (the underside of the vermiculite insulation as per the plans) sits on the ground. The rest of the design is basically as per the book. The images to follow show you what I mean (click on the thumbnails for bigger photos). The whole oven including labour (except for my own) totalled A$8,000 (US$6,000). This included everything, from the bricks, thermocouples, concrete, vermiculite, to the hired equipment, any building tools that I purchased, the brickies and his labourers, the tiled roof, the oven tools and even the $50 "Thankyou Flowers" to our neighbour for letting us have access from her back garden. The paid labour accounted for about half the cost. The relatively high cost was mostly because of having to partly demolish an existing wall and building new retaining walls. Breaking the costs down (in A$): the materials for oven itself including facade and roof was $1,800; the temperature gauge fully setup was $300; the oven tools $100; and the hired labour totalled $1,300. This gives a total of $3,500 just for the oven. If you were to build a free standing oven then you would obviously have to add the base to the cost. For anyone in Perth, Western Australia, who is comtemplating building a brick oven based on "The Bread Builders" I have included a list of Suppliers that lists the main companies that I sourced the various materials. One of the main difficulties I had during construction was trying to source all the various materals. |
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