When Life Hands You Construction Materials…

…make an oven to cook Christmas dinner!

Following tradition where my sister and I cook Christmas dinner every year for our family, I’ve signed up to be part of the team cooking dinner for the All Hands Philippines base volunteers and local staff. We’re expecting around 100 diners once the local staff brings their families, and we’ve only got four gas burners, so the team decided to improvise a little bit. After all, what’s Christmas dinner without a nut roast/loaf?

Volunteers have already made benches and even a ping pong table from scrap material, so when someone suggested we fashion a stove with construction leftovers, I was totally on board. On sites where the local workers build sand sifters, metal wire tiers, mud tampers, and heaps of other construction tools, it shouldn’t be too hard to build an oven, right?

So, we gathered some cement, gravel, sand, and mud (so much mud) from one of the construction sites and got to work! Hopefully it holds up when we start cooking tomorrow…

Oven materials: 1 bag of cement, 2 bags of sand, 6 bags of gravel, 20 bags of mud/clay

Found some wire on base to make the skeleton of the oven

Reinforcing the skeleton with a second batch of wire

Mixing cement and mud/clay until its firm enough to pack on

Beginning to pack the clay mixture on to the skeleton. Allan very happy about this it seems.

Packing on more mud. It’s starting to take shape!

This looks like nothing, but it’s me inside the oven applying the inner layer of mud/clay/cement stuff

Finished! We added a concrete slab bottom for good measure as well as a pipe on the side for oxygen and a smokestack on top for, well, smoke

Firing the oven for the first time the next day. Slab was dry and there was a bit of smoke, but looks good so far!