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If you are anything like me, you have always wanted to travel to southern Italy to experience the beautiful weather, friendly people, and delicious food.
But what if I told you that you don’t actually need to board an airplane and fly all the way to the Amalfi Coast to drink buckets of red wine and shovel cheesy bread into your face?
In fact, for about the same price as a family vacation to Italy, you could probably have an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven built in your backyard and bring the flavors of Naples to you.
It is the twenty-first century and times have changed. It is no longer the 90s. Gone are the days where a frozen Tombstone pizza is enough to elicit cries of joy from the family. And don’t even get me started on Bagel Bites.
Our pizza game, much like our internet game, is considerably stronger in this new millennium. You can throw out your AOL floppy disks and your dial up modem.
Save some room in the trash can for your frozen Totino’s Party Pizza; and yes, even your formerly precious Digiorno is as whack and played out as your old Jnco jeans.
So we are all in agreement that with your new outdoor pizza oven, your pizzas are going to be amazingly great and extremely delicious. Unfortunately though, if you have an irrigation system, things aren’t all going to be as perfect as your sourdough crust will be.
You will need to make sure that your sprinkler system is not broken during the pizza oven construction process. But don’t worry, we’re going to try to help prevent any damage from occurring.
First things first, you’ll need to determine whether you are going to have an outside pizza oven built by a mason or if you are just going to have a concrete slab poured and have an outdoor pizza delivered that will be placed on the concrete slab.
Either way, the impact on your irrigation system should be the same. You will need to have the mason or landscaping contractor or hardscape company mark the location of the new concrete slab before the construction work begins.
Next, you will need to contact your irrigation company to schedule time for them to locate the irrigation components that are currently underground where the new concrete slab is going.
I imagine that your new outdoor pizza kitchen is likely going in your backyard.
In addition to sprinkler heads and feeder lines that will need to be capped or moved out of the way, there might be valve boxes, mainline pipes, or wires to be moved out of the area where the concrete slab and your outdoor pizza oven will go.
Your irrigation contractor should be able to locate any valve boxes that need to be moved.
If the valve boxes are not visible because they have been mulched over or grass has grown over them, your sprinkler company should be able to locate them with an electronic tracking device. This method can also often be used to locate the mainline pipe, since a wire usually runs along with the mainline pipe.
To find the sprinkler heads, the irrigation system can be turned on manually.
If any of the sprinkler heads, pipes, wires, or valve boxes are in the way, the irrigation company will move them out of the way.
Then, you will be ready to toss some oak firewood into your brand new outdoor pizza oven, light it up (safely!), toss your pizza in, and conjure up some culinary magic.
Buon appetito!