DIY Making a Patio Fire Pit

I have this thing about tackling projects when Rudy is away.  And usually they are really big projects that I don't have any business doing on my own.  A prime example is when I decided to cut down all of the bamboo in our backyard.  I so, so, so wish I had a picture of this!  Let me give you the visual - probably 300 shoots of bamboo, 2 inches thick and about 40 feet tall.  Reminder - I am 5 feet tall.  Let me give you another visual...the piles of bamboo were so large they could have filled up an 18 wheeler.  Not joking!  We had a huge mess and had to hire people to get rid of it all.

So that brings me to my point in that Rudy was away backpacking and I decided to tackle a project for him.  Except for this time instead of being a project that makes more work for him, it was a nice surprise for him.  I decided to build a more substantial fire pit.  Rudy loves fires and our existing fire pit was looking a little sad.  The whole thing cost me about $46 since we already had a fire pit bowl.

Here is the how to:

This is our fire pit area before.  I have awesome neighbors that helped me bring all of the bricks down.  The top of it is rusted and the bowl is as well.

The first thing I had to do was decide where the pit was going to go.  At some point we will probably do something better to this lower patio but for now it is what we have.  I decided to place the pit in the corner in an effort to conceal this crack.

Another thing I was hoping to conceal was the missing section of the outside of the bowl.  I am not sure how this happened!  My plan is to place the top row of bricks on the bowl itself to hide this defect.

I used the existing stand (the bowl itself is heavy) to place the bricks.  I had already measured the bowl and used this to determine how many bricks I needed with the nice guy at Lowes.

Then I placed the bricks around it and thought this is going to be so easy!

But sadly, when I placed the bowl down there was a big gap.

So I took out a row of bricks but that made it too small.  Then I expanded the bricks but couldn't get it right.  I eventually ended up adding the row of bricks back and nudging the bricks with my foot until I eventually got it just right.  I wish I had done that to begin with!  I ended up with 4 layers of bricks with 12 bricks in each layer.

I have some more things to do to this lower level (and the backyard in general) but this is a great start!