Well here is some information about the wood oven that we researched, designed and built from scratch. This is the best thing we have ever built for day to day use. Basically it's a lump of bricks, glue and mortar that you heat with a fire and then it retains and radiates the heat back for hours, most people call them Pizza ovens but there are differences, we built ours more like a bread oven using clay fire bricks rather than clay or man-made fire bricks, so that it would retain heat longer. The Videos pretty much tell the whole story but there are some bits here that I might not have mentioned in the film.
I did look at kits but they were very expensive and still needed to be built from scratch, so I decided to look in to what was needed to make my own.
I looked at clay based ovens and even though they are good cheap and easy to build I was not sure if this was what we really wanted. They do not retain the heat as long as brick unless they are very thick walled, so make good pizza ovens and you can cook in them the same but temperature drop off is faster than brick so no long slow cooking. I can stop using my oven at 6-7pm and it will still be 160 deg C at 11 o'clock the next day.
So after looking at man-made fire brick's (quite expensive), run of the mill house bricks (people do use these and they seem to work but I have read that they chip and fracture when heated so you can get brick dust in your food?) and red clay fire bricks, in the end decided on red clay fire bricks (these are normally twice fired clay bricks that are stamped and used in fire places and chimneys in houses. I looked on NZ's version of EBay (trade me) and found a guy who had 190 bricks just taken out of a chimney and up for sale I bought these, as it was I only ended up using 90 of them and re sold the rest for nearly as much as I paid for them.

Because the bricks had been used and where at least 90 years old they were not going to make a good base in the oven, so I did buy man-made tiles for this, they are rated to 1200 Deg C, they are also a lot thinner than the red bricks so the plinth (base) of the oven would not need to be so thick. Once I had decided on size of oven etc. as per the video, I then worked out where I would put the oven and started on the clearing that area

and then building the stand for the oven, you do not need to use thermal cement for the stand but it must have reinforcing bar in it especially in the plinth the oven sits on.

There are a few requirements for the oven.

One is the cement you should use refractory cement (withstands very high temp)you're not meant to use normal cement for the oven its self; ( I have now seen ovens that have been built using normal cement and they seem to work but hey what if it doesn't) you have to use a refractory type cement that is man-made and used for extreme temperature areas like a furnace/fireplace. For bonding of the bricks when building the dome, I used refractory glue; this is used for sticking bricks to metal to line a furnace and has a quick dry time and high heat resistance. I then coated the oven in the refractory cement to fill all the gaps between the bricks.

You then cover this in more cement the thicker the better the heat retention, now I had a choice here stick 6 inches of cement on the oven or after looking around and speaking to a company (Certec NZ) I decided on a FB blanket, this is not the fire blanket type thing you buy for you kitchen this is a ceramic polymer weave about an inch thick that gives the same thermal protection as 4 – 6 inches of cement of clay this makes the oven smaller and lighter. The FB Blanket was quite reasonable in fact cheaper than the cost of cement. It was $140 NZ for 4.5 meters which was plenty to do the oven. This gets wrapped all around the oven then a layer of silver foil is laid over it to protect it from the wet cement, on top of this I used chicken wire so the next coat of cement coat would stick and way to go. I have put 2 coats of cement on top the second has been colored to make the

oven look nicer but you could do anything you like tiles, mosaics or just draw in the cement. That is pretty much it, the chimney is built from normal bricks, I have now added a larger flu so the draw on the oven is better, We also ended up putting a cover over the area as I did find in the winter that the bricks would absorb a lot of moisture due to how dry they would be after using the oven. So would take a lot longer to heat up I say a lot where talking ½ hour or so more. The oven normally takes about 45 minutes to get up to 550 – 600 Deg C .

I also made a work surface next to the oven. I used granite for the top as its great for rolling out Pizza dough and kneading bread on.

The planter we put next to the oven is used for growing herbs and stuff for cooking with, I have also planted a grape there as well, one for the grapes hmmm grapes and also if you want to add some flavor to the food you can dry the branches you trim off and then soak in water over night before using the oven and add to the fire when cooking to give a bit of flavor. We have found that grape and Olive are very nice and add that different taste to your food.

You can hot smoke in the oven but it does not take long I added hickory shavings when I was cooking a chicken, I only kept the door in for 20 minutes to trap the smoke but god even the bones on the chicken where smoked lol, about 5 minutes would have been fine and probably only 1 hand full of hickory chips not the 5 I put in.

As for cooking in the oven, well it's taken a while and was a bit trial and error in the beginning, this is due to having to learn how quick stuff cooks, where is cooler in the oven and where is hotter, what place does the heat whip around the dome so you can brown the top of food Etc.

We have cooked everything in the oven and pretty much it all comes out good, from steak dinner with oven chips to racks of pork ribs marinated overnight and slow roasted for 6 hours in the oven. My favorite is shoulder of pork, I light the oven at about 8am get it up to top temperature then put a whole shoulder in for about 30mins to brown and make the crackling. Then wrap it in a double layer of foil stick it back in the oven put the door in and come back after 6 -7 hours, the pork just falls apart and tastes so nice. Anyway I will add more about cooking in the oven when I have time especially about making bread and pizza dough's.

One other thing is tools for the oven, I did make my own to start with but in the end I bought a nice set of oven tools.
They make life so much easier, though the pan hook is still my own homemade one as its only used to grab pans from the back of the oven. I will add some pictures when I get a chance. I will when I have time also add a page about using the oven and cooking some stuff. Also the table in the picture was the one I was making when I opps accidentally cut my finger off with the table saw, its made from white cedar, the tree was originally in the ground of government house in Auckland but had to be removed so I managed to get a fair amount of the wood once it was treated and dried, it was free but cost me in the end lol.