Brian Paonessa

Almost every year we have a guy come to our house and pressure wash the decks and handle whatever laborious tasks are on the to-do list that day. Among the endless list of to-do-work was to build a fire pit out of paverstone retaining wall stones.

That morning I called in an order to Home Depot, gave a drawing and some instructions to our friend, and headed off to work. When I arrived home a nifty, kind of falling over fire pit greeted me in the yard. The leveling was subpar and therefore the pit was a bit shaky. So Saturday morning I disassembled it and reconstructed it to be a bit more to my original plan, I also shrunk it by a couple of inches because 42-Inches is HUGE and I just want to burn yard waste and make smores.

After finishing up I opted to put a ring around the pit so that the dead zone (area of the grass killed by the heat) would not look so ugly. So another trip to Home Depot. They did not have anything that would cleanly make a ring around the pit but I hacked together a ring out of the wall capstones, its “ehh..” but can be replaced later.

I think it came out pretty nice, sure my Dad who is a stone mason will chuckle at this, but he is welcome to come down and show me how to do it right anytime…hint, hint!