Barbecuing outside in summer is a lot of fun and baking your own bread or pizza is also pure pleasure. However, most common grills are anything but eye-catching. A home-made stone oven looks much better.
You don't necessarily have to be an expert to do this, you just have to know a little about chimney construction. First of all, an oven for the garden needs a stable foundation. When choosing a location, you should definitely pay attention to the main wind direction so that neighbors do not feel bothered by the smoke from the stove.
You should also take into account how far the oven should be from the house and what the conditions are for a comfortable seating area. After all, you can not only prepare food in such an oven, but it also serves as a heater on cooler summer evenings.
The foundation is cast from concrete, although you can also use large, finished concrete slabs. It is important that the oven is completely stable later. Now it's time to actually build the oven, whereby the self-builder can freely decide how big the oven should be.
If you want to grill in this oven later, you should buy a grill rack in advance and adjust the oven size to the grill rack. So that the oven later has a comfortable working height, a base should first be built. Simple bricks can be used for the masonry, but care must be taken to ensure there is sufficient insulation. You choose the height of the base according to your height.
A thick concrete slab is now placed on the base, on which an ash pan will later be placed. Now you continue building as high as the working height is required. You should pay attention to wall projections where a grill grate can easily fit. There is another plate on top, but it must have a hole in the middle so that the smoke exhaust can be mounted there.
The interior of the actual oven is ideally made of firebricks, as they can store heat and moisture well and then release them gently and evenly. You can use an ordinary stovepipe, available from any fireplace builder, to exhaust the smoke. Depending on your taste, you can also construct a conversion for the smoke outlet and attach a small roof at the top so that it cannot rain into the oven.
So that pizza and bread can bake really well, you need a door for the oven. The best way to do this is to contact a fireplace builder; they have the option of ordering oven doors individually. This means you can also buy doors that are visually very appealing. In any case, it is important to create a drawing in advance with the respective dimensions.
This way you can get a clear idea of what the oven should look like. You can get inspiration in any good hardware store, where there are a lot of barbecue fireplaces that are basically very similar to an oven for the garden.
