Fire Pit Day 2

Alright, so here we are, day 2 of fire pit construction. I started of day two by removing the stones from the pit. It will soon become obvious why leveling yesterday may not have been necessary.

Once the stones were removed a trench needed to be dug. In moments, said trench was to be filled with gravel. The gravel will allow a bit of drainage from beneath the stones to keep water from building up, at least as much as would otherwise be the case.

Once the gravel was in place I tamped it down a bit to have a solid bed to lay the stones on. This was to help minimize settling later. Then it was time to replace the stones and begin the actual process of leveling the ring, and boy was that fun.

The leveling portion of the afternoon took about an hour and a half I would say. You can see me above with two levels, a bag of gravel, and my trusty rubber mallet. When doing such things, always use a rubber mallet, as it will not chip or crack the stone you are working with. Basically we were out to be sure that each individual stone was level as well as the stones next to each other to ensure that when complete the ring would be level and stable.

After a good deal of time and effort we were left with the level ring that you see below.

At this point we were able to start piling on the other layers. Between each layer we put a bead of masonry adhesive to ensure the blocks stay in place. You will want to make sure to apply a generous bead, but not too much.

Once we got to stacking on the final layers moving quickly became important. The adhesive gets tack pretty quickly. I would estimate that we got the final three layers in place in about ten minutes. Here is what we had immediately after the final layer was set.

Once the walls were in place we added several additional inches of gravel into the bottom of the pit and spread it about. So, there you have it. That is basically the construction of our fire pit. The only other thing we did was add some extra dirt around the pit and tamp it down to try to level the surrounding area a little.

The couple of pictures above are just some of the finishing touches, namely raking out the gravel in the bottom of the pit. All in all I would say a couple of afternoons well spent.

In case you were wondering the materials used were as follows:
-68 Blocks
-4 Bags of Gravel (.5 cubic yds. each)
-2 Tubes Masonry Adhesive

Of course there were a variety of tools used to carry out the job. They included:
-Axe
-Sledgehammer
-Shovel
-Tamp Tool
-Rake
-Mallet
-Levels
-Tape Measure