Breba: Firepit

In previous blog posts, you can see where I tore down a beehive fire pit in my backyard. It took a while to get all the brick out of my backyard, but finally after filling up many buckets and dumping them into my garbage can, I was able to get it cleared out so I could work on my next project. The first task was to get a fire ring. I checked craigslist and ended up getting one of the largest rings you can, for only 55 bucks, which is a steal! I knew I wanted the base to be made of cement, and so finding a cement mixer was the next item on my list. You can rent cement mixers at home depot, but they are about 60 dollars for 2 hours, and I knew I would use it more than 2 hours. So I tried to find one on craigslist. I ended up finding one for 20 bucks, I mean of course he didn’t have it listed for 20 but I got him down to 20. I wish I would have taken a picture of it loaded up in the back of my corolla, how I ever got it in there I will never know and more importantly how I got it out all by myself. I had envisioned how I would build the form, in order to pour the cement. But as I started building the form, I realized it would take forever and a friend who just happens to have a dad with a wood shop stopped by and helped me out. On Saturday morning we got up and built the form and in the afternoon I poured the concrete. I was going to just use a rubber hose to run the propane over, but after going to a propane shop, he convinced me to use black iron pipe. I had to dig a foot down, but now it won’t rot or go bad. The last step was to attach a flagstone edge. Cutting the flagstone was a nightmare and getting it shaped just right to fit together was even worse. All in all, I would have done things very different, but it was a good learning experience for sure.