DIY Firepit

Last fall Tyler's dad's landscaping company came up and turned our jungle of a front yard from this..

to this..

We have done a lot already this spring and right now we are working on a front patio to the right of our walkway.

My favorite part of what they did in our yard is this retaining wall.

We had a ton of these bricks left over just sitting in our back yard.  So we decided to use them to make ourselves a little fire pit.  Ty and I always have our pantry stoked with smore's stuff because we make them on a regular basis using our gas stove.  So we knew we would get our use out of this fire pit.

So the hardest part was that bricks used for retaining walls generally have a lip on the bottom and we didn't want to spend money on new ones (I'm really cheap if you can't tell).  So Ty bought a cement blade for his wood saw and it worked wonders.  Not the prettiest finish but they are on the bottom of the brick anyway.  

It's a pretty messy job.  We could have filled a 3 gallon bucket of sand and debris from sweeping our garage after this project.

So we first built the fire pit so that we could figure out where to dig down in our grass.

The hardest part was leveling out the ground.  Payton even got in on the action.

Next we put down some paver sand so that we could really level it out.  Probably not necessary but we also had a ton of this leftover from the fall so why not?

Then we laid our first layer of bricks.

Then the second...

And third...

After a few times of using it we decided we wanted to put down a layer of small rock inside the pit and in the outer ring inside the grass.  I don't have a picture of it with the rock but it looks a lot better.  It makes the grass flush with the rock instead of the inch and a half of an indent.

Here is what it looks like now but we intend to use those grey pavers for steps on our side yard, but decided they would work for temporary seats until we buy some new campfire seats.  I really want to buy some like this.  

We also intend to take out the grass later on down the road and cement some stones in this square area.  But for now we LOVE it!