When we sold our house in Melbourne, I had to say goodbye to a dear friend…my handbuilt pizza oven. A work of love, it was a massive brick vault, complete with carefully cut keystones. It was built on a wooden arched scaffold, with the keystones wedged in at the end and set in place.

When it was ready it was lit, and the arched frame burnt out. Miraculously the arch held, the bricks settled in place, and over the next few years we cooked pizzas for up to 50 people at a time.

So when we looked at this farm, I was stunned to find there was a pizza oven in the garage.

First impressions, however, weren’t great. It has a short chimney, which is wonky and badly built, and the outside is rendered with an ugly mix of chicken mesh and slapped-on concrete mix. Inside the shed was not the place for a wood fired pizza oven. Its dark, the pizza oven door faces away from the light, it would be a fire hazard, and I would have to carry all the firewood, food and pizzas through two doors.

It was too dark to look inside the oven, but I could make out a lot of sticks and a bag of, I assumed, concrete. I came away thinking along the lines of sledge-hammer, broken rubble etc.

Then the next time I had a look at it, I brought a torch. I cleaned out the kindling, and pulled out the bag, which turned out to be powdered milk for lambs.

Inside it was a thing of beauty, an elegantly built dome, bricks perfectly aligned. The issues with the ugly exterior became solvable problems. But how to use it given the location?

The mystery was, why was it built inside the shed in the first place?

The answer is, it wasn’t.

It was originally built next to a small machinery shed. That shed was next to the house. Then about five years ago the small shed was demolished to make room for a new massive shed. The new shed has a footprint of nearly 450 square metres, and it swallowed the pizza oven whole, where it has sat in the dark ever since.

So, on and off since we moved in, I’ve been thinking how we could move it. It’s a big job. I counted the bricks, and calculated the concrete in it, and came up with a weight of somewhere between 2800 and 3200 kilos. Its mounted on a steel frame, with a poured concrete slab deck surfaced with bricks, with the steel legs encased in massive concrete pads.

And the penny dropped during the olive harvest. I don’t have the gear to lift and move something like that. But on the day, a very big tractor was here to lift the big crates of olives onto the transport truck to take them off for pressing. The owner was happy to discuss another hire job.

It was Andris who inspired me to build my oven in Melbourne. He showed me the CAE course, and showed up when I was building it and helped me. And he got me motivated on this one too.

He drove up during the week and we poured the slab for the new location.

A steel frame is being built to bolt onto the new slab. When that’s ready, we’ll hire the heavy duty lifter from a nearby farm, hoist the oven, cut the legs, transport round the side of the house to a nice, shady location next to the verandah, then weld it onto the new frame.

Then eat lots of pizza.