Fire Pit

[scott_vt]

Good Evenin harpoonalt,
Gee that came out great ! Thanks for posting all the great pics also !

Post more pics of the first fire and of course the whiskey !

 

[Egon]

Looking Good!

[My best ideas come after about beer #6 on a nice hot summer day!
/QUOTE]

Most of us have to rely on "She Who Is In Command" for those ideas!

 

[EddieWalker]

Nice job. I like the rock that you put around the fire pit to stand on and keep the grass separate from the fire pit. Thanks for the update and commentary.

Eddie

 

[jd2305cd]

harpoonalt - I am going to do a simlar thing (hopefully in a weekend) at the cottage. Can you give me a rough idea how much brick you used? Also the overall diameter..

Thanks looks great..

 

[JB4310]

Fire pit looks great, I'm not to crazy about the white stone around, IMO it distracts from the beauty of the professionally laid natural stone work and it gets messy, some type of flat patio stone would go better.

If you get a good sized fire in there you wont be standing that close anyway though

JB.

 

[harpoonalt]

Thanks for the nice comments! I'm not crazy about the stone color either. I wanted a darker color but whatever vein the pit is working at the time is your choice. We're going to live with it for awhile until we find some complementary flagstone to put down instead. The pit is based on a DIY rock solid episode. They called for 60 firebrick for a smaller pit. We used 3 rows of 16 or 48 total for a larger pit. The pit is 6' OD with foot thick walls and an ID of 4'. The one on tv was smaller and didn't look right in our yard when I did the layout so we upsized. Still need some fire pictures and hopefully the right patio stone will show up in the stone yard and we'll finish that. Hope that helped.

 

[jd2305cd]

My attempt to copy your design and idea..

Blue stone cost 200 bucks for a pallet.
Firebricks - 90 bucks for 50 of them
mortar - 6 bags 40 bucks (lazy, premix kind)
cement - 4 bags 35 bucks

Poured the footer, stacked the bricks (which i couldn't get mortar to stick to very well) then did the outside layer and finally the Caps.. Poured the footer the weekend before, but did the whole fire pit in one day. First time ever doing mason work..

 

[linearxs]

Do you need to have the fire brick inside? Will the blocks/rocks crack if you don't have the fire brick to dissipate the heat?

 

[harpoonalt]

Hey, that looks great! You're a lot faster than we were. You're gonna love it! Not sure if the fire brick is necessary, but some have said regular rock can explode with high heat, so I opted to do the fire brick. Cheap insurance. We've had a few fires now and love the addition to our yard. So much that we did a little more landscaping. Eventually hope to do bluestone around the pit and add a walkway to the house. we made it a little big which makes starting fires a little harder but we can fit a lot of people around it. Cooks a mean Smore

 

[jd2305cd]

Landscaping looks great! We had some rock left over so going to make boarders around a couple of the flower beds to match for the wife..

I kicked the idea around and around on the clay bricks. What a guy who builds clay pizza ovens told me was that the red solid bricks can be used for the top of the oven and will hold up just fine in the long run, but you might have a couple crack. The fire brick will last longer and are really meant for the high heats and cooling/heating cycles..

So when spending 300 - 400 bucks, whats another 100 for some insurance.. Specially when your spending the time and effort.