The Fire Pit Patio

It's almost "fire pit season."  That's the time of year that we build fires in the fire pit and sit outside and stare into the flames.  Peaceful.  Relaxing.  The photo below shows our fire pit.  The river rock square is a trip and fall hazard.  We normally put benches on the inside of the square and then back up when the fire is roaring.  The rocks do nothing but remind us that we have Build Fire Pit Patio as an item on our to do list.

Might as well do it since the weather is conducive to a little manual labor.  We marked out the size of our proposed patio, squared it up and got ready to drive in stakes to mark our corners and build our form.

I got out a mattock and began to work up a two inch indention in the rock-hard soil.

Finally we had it all done and moved the dirt out of the way in wagons!  That was more work than I thought it was going to be.

The form was constructed and we went to the local hardware store and bought 80 pound bags of gravel mix concrete.

Pouring concrete is hard.  The last time I did it I threw out my back mixing it with a shovel and shoveling it into place.  There has to be an easier way.  We found on You Tube a method called "Dry Pouring Concrete.  After watching the videos, we felt like this was the thing to do.  I'll show you the process.

First, you pour the bags of concrete into the form.  Use a long 2 x 4 to screed.  Our problem was that our form was bigger than any 2x4 that we had.  This meant that we were unable to level it properly, even going side to side from the corners.  I would have liked it to have been smoother, but it wasn't to be.  Once we had it as level as we were going to get it, we used a paint roller to smooth out the bigger ridges.

The powder is there.  Now you take a water hose and set it to mist.  Mist the concrete until it turns a darker color gray.

In exactly an hour, you do mist it again.  An hour following that, you set the garden hose sprayer to "shower" and shower the concrete real good.  An hour later you do it again.  An hour later you do it again.  (For every inch of thickness, you shower it in one hour intervals.)

Once that was done, we decided to dress it up a little by soldiering pavers on the surrounding edges.  We laid a base of sand and leveled the pavers with the slab.

We were going to put a plastic edging around the entire thing, but decided to make a concrete retainer.  We used the 'dry pour' method with this as well.  We poured the concrete powder and used a concrete edging tool to put the powder at a 45 degree angle about halfway up the paver.  We misted and sprayed.  This edge will keep the pavers from sliding.

Between the pavers, we poured polymeric sand, packing it in, sweeping it in and then used a leaf blower to blow off the excess.  Then we showered it in.

I pulled the dirt over the outer concrete retainer so that it met with the edge of the pavers.  We like the way it turned out.

We intend on spending many upcoming evenings outside enjoying the new fire pit patio.  It's not a perfect construction project, by any stretch of the imagination, but the job is complete and I'm sure we'll enjoy it.