Build Your Dream Fire Pit Fast

Today, we're building a fire pit, and I've got a lot of stuff to unload from the truck because I bought a lot of different options. So I can show you some of the different varieties that are out there between leveling options, different pavers and even fire inserts. We're going to cover that all today. I'm Brad from Fix This Build That. Let's build something awesome. And we're here in my backyard, and I've done a lot of projects to make it look nice back here on the deck. But we still are using a nasty old fire pit. So making a nice permanent stone fire pit is going to be a great addition back here. There's a lot of different things to consider. I'm walking through all those with you. And the first thing we're going to start with is stone selection. For stones, you have a few options that you can get at the home center. I went to Home Depot to pick up mine, and I got this 12 inch retaining wall brick. If you're making a circular fire pit, you're probably looking for one that has this wedge shape to it. And this one is nice because it does have the flat sides on it. But it does have this little lip on here, which is used for setting back retaining wall. So you might have to knock that off or it's not going to sit proper. And today's prices, these are coming in at $218 a brick. So if you had a three tiered fire pit with 12 stones on each, you're going to come up to right under $80. Now, like I said, these are wedge shaped bricks. And so if you put them edge to edge, they're going to naturally make a circle. And so when I put these together, the retaining wall bricks, it takes 10 of them to make a circle if you put them edge to edge with no gaps. And that's the look that we're going for. So if you do that here with 10 bricks, the opening becomes right around 25 inches. Now, that is quite a bit smaller. What we want, we want about a three foot fire pit or maybe 30 inches. So to get that, what we would have to do is back these up and open the gaps. So as we do that, we would make room for the other two bricks that we would need to make that size. So adding in those two... These cicadas are getting excited about this fire pit. Now, adding in these two extra stones, that gets me to the measurement that I want, which is right around 33 inches. But the problem is when you add the stones in and widen them, now you have these gaps here. And that's going to translate as we make the layers up. I don't want to do a top cap for these. And so that means that we would have gaps on the top. And personally, I just don't like that look. And if you're OK with it, then that's fine. Not that there's anything wrong with that. No, of course not. Next up, we have what they call a wall stone. And this is a tumbled brick look. So it does have the flat edge on one side and it is tumbled and kind of just organic on the rest of it. Now, I like the looks of this one a lot better. But the downsides of this one is with this rough top, it's a little bit harder to level. And I found that out when I was doing retaining wall in the front yard. I struggled mightily. And in this row is really kicking my butt. But they really look nice. And if they're on a firm foundation, you can make them work. Now, these come in at two dollars and forty eight cents. So if you go with thirty six of those, it'll be right around ninety dollars. And we're going to be going with this one because I like the way that it stacks and the size of the circle it gives you when everything is edge to edge. Let me show you what I mean. So you can really see the differences side by side here. All together with the twelve stones. This one is about thirty three inches, whereas ten stones and no gaps. This one is closer to twenty five. And I really like the look of the tight together stones. So we're definitely going to go with this one. One other option you do have to expanding a ring is using some spacer bricks. But what you can do is use these spacer blocks. And then as you move them out, you can put this spacer in between. And then now that's going to increase the overall diameter of your ring. And also it's a nice little design feature. But you'll have to find the stones that are the exact same height as your other blocks. All right. The next thing you need to think about is fire rings. And I've got a few of them right here. And I'm going to talk about the different options of why you might use one versus the other. You don't have to use a firing insert, but it's going to make your bricks hold up longer and can also add to the look and the feel of your fire pit. Now, the first one here, this is a galvanized fire pit. And this one I am not going to recommend. These are about ninety dollars locally. Now, the big downfall of these is one it does not have a flange around the top, so it's not going to sit over your bricks and kind of hold everything together. And it is the tallest at about 12 inches. But you can kind of see it is very misshapen. So we're about 32 inches this way and 34 inches that way. Now, these other two fire rings, these are your more traditional. They have a flange on top and they have some type of black powder coating to keep them from rusting. Now, this one is a solid surface, so it looks really good. Bro, making a video here. I got this one locally. This one was, I think, 110 dollars. And honestly, I like the look of this one the best because it does have that one piece flange on top. And actually, they sell this in a kit at Lowe's for two hundred and forty eight dollars. You can get enough for three layers of the stones. And this, if you do the math, they're ripping you off because you can buy this for 110 and all the stones, like I mentioned earlier, for 90. So you get the whole thing for 200. The problem is, is that it is pretty shallow. We're only about six inches here. And so this is not really deep. And you'd have to build up the gravel underneath to continue to protect the bricks. Now, on the other hand, I get this one. This one was off of Amazon and this comes in a four piece kit. I assembled this together with bolts. You do have this break here where they come together. So that is going to be a little bit of a lip. And obviously, it's just not as visually appealing as a solid ring. But this one is 10 inches tall, and that's going to work really well in our three layer fire pit. Now, looking at how these fit, the galvanized one is way too big, doesn't even fit down inside there. Now, the small ring fits perfectly in there. And like I mentioned, they sell this in the kit. So that's not surprising. The one that we're going to be going with is the segmented one with a nice flange lip on it. And that one fits down nicely. There's a nice size gap here in between the brick and the insert. And that will be great if you're going to be doing a smokeless fire pit. Now, we're not doing a smokeless fire pit today, but let me know down in the comments if you'd be interested in seeing how that converts. Now that we've got our materials picked out, the next thing to consider is the location of your fire pit. And the main consideration you want to have is in between any structures, your deck or house or a fence. And for us locally here, we need to be 15 feet off. Typically, it's 10 to 20 feet, depending upon your location. Now, for us, 15 feet lands right here, which is clearly in front of the fire pit. We're actually going to be going back just a little bit this way. So we should be fine. But not only where the fire pit is, but think about where the seating is going to be. So you're going to want to look at five feet or so, six feet away from the fire pit. Make sure that the center in the fire pit is about six feet away from any slope. And that's going to make it a lot better to sit around the fire and enjoy it and not tumble down the hill. Now we can start placing and digging the fire pit. So this is going to be right about here. And you can mark the center and then do a outline with spray paint. But I find an easier way to do that is to just lay the bricks down around the fire pit. So we'll go ahead and move these over. Now we can use the stone ring to define the edge. And I'm going to use a flat shovel to do that and just go around and mark it. Now, what we want to do is add a little bit of gravel on the outside of our ring. If you didn't want to do that, you can just go straight up against these stones. But what we're going to do is we're going to add about a little three inch gravel line around the side. So I'm going to use these little pavers around here and just stack a few of them up and then just cut a line all the way around and I'll move the stones around as I go. All right, fast forward. This is day two. That's because some rain came in right after we got through outlining this. And now for the Tuesday edition of rain, rain, go away. But don't worry, you should easily be able to get this done in one day as long as it doesn't rain. Now, I'm going to go ahead and remove these stones and then dig out two to three inches here and a deeper hole in the middle, which we're going to use for drainage. And I'll show you more about that in a minute. Now, before you start digging, you want to make sure you know what is under the area where you're going to dig. And a way to do that is by calling 8-1-1. Today's sponsor is Georgia 8-1-1. They want to remind us that there are utilities that could be very shallow under your ground. And so you want to make sure that you don't hit one of those. You could cause an outage in your area or worse. You could cause serious injury or even death. So you can call 8-1-1 or you can go to your state's 8-1-1 website. They will coordinate with the public utilities and have a locate technician come out and will mark on your property where all the lines are at. For us, they were all on the side. So we are completely free to dig back here. And 8-1-1 is a completely free service. And Georgia 8-1-1 is trying to get out the message. They also have free giveaways on their site. And this month, they're going to have five winners that get a hundred dollar gift card. I have a link down below in the description where you can check it out and you can enter every month into a new giveaway. So just remember to call 8-1-1 before you dig. So digging this pit down is not only going to allow some drainage, but it is also level everything out. So if your yard slopes, you don't want to just build your fire pit on top of it and have those stones tumble over and not be really sturdy. The other thing is for drainage. Having two to three inches of paver base, which is what I'm going to put in here, it's going to allow some drainage. But we've also got some clay soil in here that doesn't really drain well. And so if you have something similar, what you can do is dig a hole in the middle and I'm going to do about a 12 inch hole that's maybe eight to 10 inches deep and then backfill that with gravel. That's going to give the water more time to drain out and soak into the soil before it floods out. And you have just a fire pit filled with water. All right, so I was digging the hole and I ended up running into a bunch of gravel. So I'm not sure what they put back here when they were building the house. But what I'm going to do is just pour a bucket of water in here and we'll see how well it drains. If it drains well, I'm just going to stop digging right now because it looks like there's already a lot of rock down there. And I guess it would help if I had an actual measure to know how fast it should be draining or not. The water is going down a bit, but it's just soaking into the dirt. So it doesn't look like it's draining as fast as I thought it might. So I'm just going to go ahead and keep digging. Apparently in a big pit of water now. There's that clay. All right. Right under that gravel, we have about six inches of hard packed clay, and that's why it wasn't draining. So this is really going to help out. And I'm just going to put in some stones here. So these are just river stones, which are really decorative. But you can definitely use gravel in here if you can get it for cheaper. This is about the cheapest thing that I could find at the home center. So I'm just going to fill up the hole up to the top. I was able to get a whole bag of rocks into that pit. So I'm going to tamp everything down and then we can move on to the paper stones. The next stage of the drainage and for the leveling, I'm going to be using some paver base underneath. Now, this is what I've used on my retaining walls and on my pavers before. This will work great to get a nice level, compact surface and it will drain and so we can get more drainage right down there into the pit. And when you start getting close to the top, you want to start screening it and leveling it a little bit. I'm going to use this two by four and I'll screed it a little bit and then tamp down and then we can start checking with the level and see where we need to add things and make sure we're level all the way across. I'm going to bring in the four foot level and we slope down this way. So I'm imagining the size can be a little bit higher. And as I look at that, it is. So what I'm going to want to do is take the paver base up so that it's even with the ground here on the shallow end. And then that way will be a little bit buried here. So it looks like I probably need to add another inch over here on this area. And we're actually pretty good here to make it level with the ground. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. Tamp it down and then we'll move on to the bricks. And it's raining again. Susan's up on the deck with the camera. We've actually got sunshine and rain and shade all at the same time. So this is what DIY projects are like, just so you know, that it's not all easy and fun. We're going to press on. We'll maybe do some filming from up there. I'm going to keep going. All right. The rain finally stopped and we are level now to check your level. You can just go around since it's a circle and just check it in different spots all around. And if it's level, then you're good to go. Also, you probably saw me using this, but getting a two by four, it works great as a screed. So you don't just jack up your level, but you can use that to screed, put it on the level section and then just kind of rotate it around in the areas that need to be lowered. And that'll just distribute the paper base nice and easy. So now I can start laying the paper stones and I'm going to start in with my first layer. And the tools I'm going to use are a dead blow mallet. This is a lot better than just a regular rubber mallet because it won't bounce off the brick, as well as a couple of levels. Probably won't use this one much. A two foot level is a lot better because you got more surface area. Now, because I rolled these bricks out to remove them, I'm just going to roll them back in and they should be in that same spot that I put them in before. You can also put the firing in here and build it around it. But I think this will work great. So I'm just going to roll this one in back to where it was before. Scooch it up. I'm going to put in the next one and then we can start leveling them off each other. Since we've leveled everything and these have a flat bottom, this should be pretty straightforward and hopefully they should be level already. So this one's just a little high. There we go. And you can also check them from front to back to make sure they're level. With these tumble stones, it's a bit harder because you've kind of got a rough surface. There's not a lot to focus on here. There we go. Now, as you're leveling these, you can just remove some of the paver base underneath if it's a bit too high and add some if it's too long. As I'm getting around to this last paver here, it doesn't quite fit in there. So I probably need to widen the circle a little bit here. And I'm just going to adjust some of these, look for any gaps. And then I think we'll be OK. And that is looking nice. All right. Now, the easy part, we just stack around the rest of them. If the ring is a little bit too tight, you can just adjust these out. Sometimes you put them too much inside and then that last one won't fit. So you can just adjust them outwards just a little bit and that'll make enough room. For the second row is lining up the middle in the seam underneath. And so on the third row, we're going to just go back and look at that seam down here and just mirror it for the top one. And then all the seams will line up and it'll look a lot nicer. I'm not using landscaping adhesive to put these blocks together like I did with my retaining wall. And that's mainly just because I do plan on coming back and adjusting this later because I think I'm going to be doing that smokeless fire pit. You guys let me know down in the comments if you want to see me do that. But I'm leaning that way. So I don't want to lock them in so I can't move them. So I'm just going to work around. But these are a little wobbly on the top because we're stacking them on top of this uneven surface. But as soon as we get these in and I put the firing in, that's going to help lock everything together, even if I don't use the adhesive. This thing is turning out awesome. And now this is with three stones right about 12 inches high. So you can see as far as the fill that you'll need inside with that six inch ring, you would need six inches of stone in there. But with our 10 inch ring, we'll only need two. And that gives you more space for the fire. So let's put the ring in and see what it looks like. All right. Now, this fire ring is pretty heavy. So this is really going to help lock together to that top layer when I put it in. So this does a pretty decent job of contacting the stones and keeping them from moving. And so that's going to help when I don't have landscaping adhesive in. Now I'm going to fill in around the sides with some landscaping rocks. I'm going to use these same river pebbles here. This is a calico stone to go around the side. It matches what we have right over there in the garden bed. And for the rocks inside there, you can just use gravel or you can use gravel. I'm going to use some lava rocks here because I think that'll give it a little bit more airflow because they're really porous. I don't know. Maybe not. I like the way they look and they'll also really help with draining. I'm just going to fill this up until it reaches the bottom of the fire ring. Let me give you a final cost breakdown and a few final thoughts while I'm starting a fire. One of the things I would definitely do is mortar together the rocks or some type of landscaping adhesive that's fire resistant because these are just a little too wobbly. I really wish I had a solid piece fire ring. If I could find one that was 10 to 12 inches deep, I would definitely upgrade to that one. As far as the cost breakdown goes, we had $90 in the stones, another $85 for this insert. We had six bags of the paper base, three bags of the landscaping stones and two bags of the rocks for 11 bags total or an additional $55. So all in, we were able to do that for $230 before tax and a day's worth of labor or two if you count the rain.