How to Make a Fire Pit Seating Area: Backyard Makeover - Thrift Diving

hey what's up Serena appeai here from thrift Iovine comso last summer I did a DIY fire pit in my backyard and it looked fantastic we enjoyed it the chairs were beautiful but guess what it didn't last it never does this is what the yard looked like recently in the last couple of weeks and you can see the fire pit was sitting out there by itself the chairs had broken down and honestly this backyard just needed to be cleaned up so in this video I'm gonna show you exactly what I did to create an amazing DIY fire pit seating area now right off the get-go this project was challenging because I could not get a straight line for nothing that whole gardening hose trick nope didn't work so I thought maybe an extension cord would work nope didn't work either so finally I said you know what enough of this I'll just pull out some spray paint and a tape measure and we'll just measure around five and a half inches now you could put a stake in the middle of the fire pit with a string and get a nice circle but this worked just as well for me all right so I removed some of the stones and now that I had everything marked I used a string trimmer to edge along right where those marks are you can barely see them in the grass but you'll see the little yellow dots and this helped to remove hmmm not the grass but the weeds so that I could see very clearly where it was gonna be marked and when I was done it looked pretty good it looks straight but this is where the hard work was gonna start and I have to admit to you the minute I started edging that walkway I thought this is insane tell me again why I decided to do this by myself without hiring someone the edgers that I was using for this was by pave stone Home Depot delivered them right into my driveway and they were a little thicker than what I realized when I saw them online so with them being five inches tall I knew that I was gonna have to cultivate and dig probably about three inches down two and a half to three inches which meant I was gonna be spending a lot of time cultivating and a lot of time digging so keep that in mind the size of your pavers will determine how much soil you're gonna have to remove now let's talk tools here for a second because you really want to sure you have the right tools I'm gonna be honest with you about halfway through this cultivating I went to the home depot tool rental section and I pleaded with a guy do you have anything that could make this go faster and quicker and easier and he said well we do but considering the small type of job you're doing you're using the right tools the cultivator and the shovel and he said I definitely recommend you get some manpower I said hey I'm a woman and I can do this he's like that's not what I meant you need help and he was right help would have been nice but let me tell you a little tip here about the shovel I'm using the wrong kind of shovel you definitely want to use a transfer shovel or a garden Spade those are flat and allow you to go around the perimeter of really any kind of gardening project where you're digging out and being able to get a nice flat smooth surface you'll see here all along the edge you'll notice that little crescent pattern that's because I was using the curved shovel so don't do that use the garden Spade something that's flatter by the end of day one I'd hoped all the cultivating would be done but of course that's never the case projects never go as planned so day two it was back to clearing out the fire pit seating area and you see that I've made a lot of progress I cleaned up as much of the soil as possible edged out a little bit cleaner the perimeter and then use the cultivator to finish up that last bit and now the fun part folks moving hundreds if not thousands of pounds of pavers to my backyard keep in mind if you get Home Depot to make a delivery like this which they will you can actually get 10% saved if you make a huge delivery like this in bulk but you'll need to have a way to transport it to your backyard so make sure you can do that with a good quality wheelbarrow for this project I just put down a layer of weed block I didn't feel the need to put sand underneath you can if you want to but I felt that these were secure they were in place they were even and I didn't need the sand now there were times when I would go to put an edger and realize that it didn't fit well and I'd need to remove some of the dirt so I used my new flat shovel because I did go to Home Depot and buy a new shovel and it worked really well and I would remove some of the dirt and use that to backfill some of the other edgers that I just put down so make sure you save that dirt and I just worked as I went along fitting them as I went now here's a little tip and this is something that I forgot to do you want to know the exact size of your edgers before you plan your space you don't want to get to the end and think oh now I've got to cut a brick in half it's possible you could do it but it's easier to design your space whether it's a walkway or a DIY fire pit without having to do any cuts so just plan accordingly I forgot to do that but thankfully everything worked out well so now it was time to move on to the wheat block fabric in the fire pit seating area I don't know what in the world I was thinking I cut all of these pieces thinking that this was going to be the perfect placement of the weed block no you do not want to have any pieces that are loose because it will shift around under your pea gravel hello Serena so when I realized what I'd done and the stupid mistake that I had done I thankfully had a huge role and I was able to create some longer pieces to put over top you'll also notice that I had some cardboard under there I just wanted to reuse some of the cardboard from another project that I have going on and if you've got extra weed block fabrics sticking out from beyond your edgers don't worry about it just cut it down with scissors you just want to make sure that your weed block fabric is nice and smooth and that it's tight underneath of your edgers now this is the point where I started getting a little ahead of myself because I started back filling the edgers before all of them were even in place and you'll see that I've got some wrinkles in my weed block fabric that's very difficult to get out and to move those edges once they're in place so backfill once you're completely done and you'll see here that I was pretty happy with the results I had a little bit of a gap there at the end but you know what overall it looks really good it was now time for the pea gravel so let me do a little math for you I bought 28 bags of 50-pound pea gravel that is 1,400 pounds of rocks in my backyard right now people that is insane and that wasn't even enough I had to go back and buy six more bags for an additional 300 now thankfully even though I did this project all by myself I did get my husband help with the bags and so I'm thankful that he brought them to me and placed them around the fire pit so that I could dump them out so this is what I was telling you earlier making sure that your weed block fabric is nice and tight because otherwise you have what happened to me where all the gravel starts to go in between and that's not what you want you want it nice and tight so it doesn't do like what it's doing here where it's starting to sort of bubble up and cause a problem so with additional bags it helps to hide it I still need to get some more but you can see that it's a pretty good job of covering all that weed block and since I had so many of the edges left over I thought oh we're gonna do the fern area we're gonna do all the edging around the yard and I still have some of these left over in my driveway so we're gonna be using them putting them to good use now the rubble stone collection from pave stone comes with kits to do all kinds of things planters fire pits even seating even benches and so what you see here are actually bench kits and I decided halfway through this project you know what I want some stone planters to kind of go with my new walkway so instead of using them for the benches I use them for the planters now typically you would use construction adhesive to hold this all together but later if I change my mind I want to be able to take it all apart and this is too funny but somebody on instagram very nicely imply that my rug was too dirty and that I need to replace it instead of being insulted I agreed with her so got a new rug got some new chairs for the fire pit seating area and overall it looks fantastic so here's the before let me remind you of what we were working with here guys this looked horrible and now it's fresh it's clean and ready for entertaining and yeah we still got to do something about the grass the weeds but you know one project at a time right my mom is gonna be retiring in the next week actually less than a week and so we're gonna have a retirement party here for her so that we could just celebrate her years of service and just enjoy each other's company so if you liked this project please give it a thumbs up be sure to subscribe to my blog and go to thrift devine calm and sign up for my newsletter and come back again because we're always doing amazing things here and I got a couple of surprises left for the outdoor so you don't want to miss that I will see you next video and a big thanks to Home Depot for sponsoring this project

Channel: Thrift Diving

Views: 3,409,275

Keywords: DIY, Thrift Diving, thrift stores, home improvement, crafting, thriftdiving, fire pit, home depot, diy firepit, back yard, diy fire pit, fire pits, patio makeover, patio ideas diy, patio ideas, patio decorating ideas, pavestone edging, rumblestone edger, rumblestone tree ring, fire pit ideas, fire pit diy, fire pit in backyard, fire pit build, outdoor overhaul makeover, backyard makeover

Id: lil6wFSajCg

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2019