Our son and his family gave us a fire pit last Christmas. They know we love camping and sitting outdoors by the campfire, so this fire pit has been a treasure – especially during the fall months.
But it needed a place to live. We’d been dragging it all around the yard, charring spots in the grass and even having fires on the sidewalk so we could put the TV on the front porch and watch baseball. That’s one thing we love about the country – we live on the backside of nowhere with no neighbors in sight, so we can get away with backwoods stuff like that.
But we needed a little more classy setup, so on Thursday, we invited some family members over on Sunday evening for a chili campfire dinner around the fire pit that we didn’t have yet – and a s’mores pie that lives in my mind but has never been made by me.
On Thursday evening, I asked a friend of ours who delivers wood to please bring me a load. He delivered it on Friday morning.
Project Fire Pit took place Saturday morning. We got up and got dressed – (a weekend accomplishment all its own) and headed out to find materials.
I had checked on Pinterest to scope out a plan and found a photo late Friday night – 10:36 p.m. to be exact. It seemed simple and pretty, so we settled on this design in the photo above. Even though our pit is square, we figured we could probably put a square pit in a round base.
We went to Lowe’s and purchased 20 rounded side bricks, 4 pavers for the fire pit feet, and several bags of white marble rock. We bought 5 busted bags since they were half price, 3 un busted bags, and used an old piece of steel we had in the barn to lay on the bottom.
Several years ago, we’d had a load of gravel delivered for our rock beds, so we jumped in the farm pickup truck and drove over to the gravel pile. We raked it off and used a load of this for the base rock under the pit. We positioned the tailgate over the center and offloaded the gravel, spreading it out as a base layer.
Next, we spread the white marble rock to cover the base layer and match the brick wall holding the rock inside.
I gave the top cover of the metal pit a quick coating of Rustoleum, and about two hours later, our fire pit had a nice new base – and a top that looks brand new!
No more charred lawn!
Next up: Project S’mores Pie!
Follow me for more daring dinner invitations to fire pits that haven’t been built and pies that haven’t been tested. The chili and cornbread? We rely on Bush’s Best Chili Magic and Jiffy Cornbread. There’s nothing like a family gathering to light a little fire under our feet to get things done!
Common Threads 