The other evening some friends and I gave up an evening of cards, foosball, and whisky drinking to instead demolish a stone and concrete planter in our front yard, and using the rubble from it, and a large brick planter in our back yard, built up the base for my pizza oven.  We still had some whisky, and enjoyed a great evening around the fire pit as well 🙂
Only bad part was me getting stung in the eye by a wasp that I upset when digging out the gravel from the demolished planter in the back yard. That was a couple days ago, and the swelling has come down – so I don’t look like Igor anymore!
 I didn’t use any cement/mortar for now – everything is just laid in place and we’ll see how it works out!  I ended up pouring all the bags of play sand onto the base and just lightly tamped it down.  I might be able to add more sand once I tamp it down a little harder, and level it out.  Next step will be to lay out the insulation bricks, and then the kiln bricks that will make up the actual floor of the oven.