Last summer I was faced with a backyard that was a big blank canvas - no grass, no garden...just dirt. So when I was trying to figure out what to do with my backyard, I decided that incorporating a bonfire pit was a must.
I came across two pictures in particular that really inspired my vision for my bonfire pit...
Source: homedesigncollections.blogspot.com |
Source: thisoldhouse.com |
I told myself, "I can do that!" and started my research to figure out how. My effort to find step-by-step instructions was proving difficult, so I decided to just figure it out as I went along. Totallllly not something I normally do. If you know me at all, you know that I get anxiety if I don't read and follow exactly as an instruction manual tells you. Approaching this project blindly was a big step for me folks.
Anxiety and all behind me, I borrowed a truck from work one day, made my way over to my local lumber yard, picked up some 12 foot long pieces of wood, some corner brackets to screw them together and then got a whole lotta pea-gravel delivered from a local landscaping business.
Here's the mess I started with...
I spent an evening or two levelling the area and used some fine sand and my tamp to level beneath the wood pieces. I screwed them together using my corner brackets and then moved on to the pea gravel.
I had soooo much pea gravel to move, so my dad allowed me to borrow his tractor for the weekend to make the process much faster and a LOT less labour intensive. The child within me was dying at the fact that I would get to drive a real tractor. That's a picture of me in the tractor below - I was pretty bad-ass I gotta say.
~Emily Grace