I am building the Grande with a fireplace. The base for the pizza oven is longer than the plans call for. In order not to have the fire bricks extending past the oven I can put another row of bricks either at the front or back. I am considering placing them at the front (would give me a little work area). Looking for thoughts.
Hi, Norm, great to see you here again!
Without getting into how you got that “extra blessing,” you can safely add regular bricks to fill out your extra space. One thought: if you add them at the front, I agree you’d have more of a work area, but you’d also have more of a reach to the back of the oven. (My oven is a Grande as well, and another 8 inches back would put the rear out of reach of my tools. Not a terrible thing but a consideration.)
If you don’t mind splitting bricks, you could literally split the difference and put half bricks at both front and rear to center the oven.
The frame bricks as you know don’t need to be firebrick, but you should still use the high temp mortar mix and make sure you have a ¼ to ⅜ inch joint between the outer and inner rows.
When I was working with backyard flare, I misunderstood his directions for extending the pizza oven base to fit the Grande. I thought i was supposed to lengthen it by 1 block (oops). Thank you for your feedback, i was wondering if the reach would be too long. So i will see how ut looks with a split brick compared to a full brick at the back. Found these bricks at a local stone yard, they are called iron bricks, they look nice with the black fire brick.
Thanks!
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It’s going to be an awesome build. 