This smokeless fire pit is better // Shed Part 6

up till now the camp house shed hasn't really been living up to its name so I fixed that by building a smokeless fire pit then I take it a step further by cleverly mounting a flat screen TV to watch some college football by the fire this blending of ancestral TV Technologies is sure to make even the coldest Ohio day a little bit more bearable [Music] say that the weather has been crappy for the past couple weeks would be kind of an understatement it's been unseasonably cold we haven't got snow once or twice we've got it three times just in the past couple weeks which means that unfortunately progress on the shed has come to a screeching halt during that time and getting work done on a metal roof when it's wet and at times icy is kind of a deal breaker for me but there are plenty of things that we can do that don't involve me getting up on the roof and one of those things is the fire pit you see it wouldn't be much of a camp house without a campfire so let's go pick a spot and put a fire pit there this process started with some very meticulous calculations to triangulate the best possible spot yeah or how about right here now you may notice it's not perfectly centered with the shed and that's because it's centered with the overhanging branches because remember only we can prevent forest fires I then dug out a circle about one foot wider than I would need to prepare for the drainage and foundation of the fire pit stone ring and I figured I might as well use the dirt to build up the area on this side of the shed that's eventually going to be used to store the firewood I then dug out the center section to help with drainage or at least that's what I'm going for remember I have no idea what I'm doing I then filled that Center section with a couple bags of River Rocks before trying to get the outer ring kind of flat and roughly level and trust me I can fully appreciate the irony in me spending so much time on this little fire pit Foundation after basically ignoring the actual shed Foundation prep altogether next up was pea gravel as a mid layer across the whole area again seemed like a good idea not sure if that's actually going to do anything but I guess we'll see my thought here is that I didn't want this fire pit to turn into a bird bath after a rainstorm so I'm trying to allow for as much drainage as possible then I just got the gravel layer roughly level I figured I didn't need it to be exact quite yet and finally for the top layer I'm putting down about an inch of paver base this stuff compacts really well and I believe should make a nice stable foundation on which my fire pit ring can stand [Music] now it's time to add my stones and I landed on these tumbled Allegheny Stones I picked up at Lowe's now they do sell a fire pit kit but I just didn't really like how the stones look that came with it so I went this route but the kit is actually pretty affordable if you like the look I then laid out a ring of stones to match the internal diameter of what I needed and figured out that I need 16 per level for a total of four levels topped with some large versions of the same stone for the top ledge which gives me my final height now this base ring is pretty important it's going to dictate the shape of the entire fire pit so I took a lot of time making sure that Circle was perfectly symmetrical then I laid down some Foundation pavers and got them set or broken now this isn't actually the end of the world but dang I didn't know I was using Thor's dead blow hammer these things are fragile a little bit of adjustment here and there left me with a nice flat level surface and I guess now is as good a time as I need to tell you about my plan for the fire pit and really the centerpiece of it all is the Brio x30 smokeless fire pit now I knew from the beginning that I wanted to go smokeless because I didn't want to hear any excuses for many kids about smoking their eyes my clothes smell so my original plan was to build a smokeless fire pit myself which is a totally valid option Brad over at fix this build that did a really good video where he went full engineering nerd and figured it out for us and it would be easy to replicate in your own backyard but the next step up is something like this this is a truly engineered product that's going to cut down the smoke dramatically and they all operate basically on the same premise they basically have a double wall around the fire pit that introduces fresh air and creates a secondary burn which eliminates a lot of the smoke and by far my favorite thing about the Brio line of fire pits is that they are all made in the USA they're super high quality it's all 304 stainless steel and they've got a couple options for the outside ones called Corton steel which is what I have which is going to get like a patina over time so if you have this sitting on a patio it'd be kind of a cool look or you can get full stainless and not worry about rust at all and that's honestly one of the cool features features of a fire pit like this you can put this by itself like on your patio and be done or you can put it in a more traditional Stone surround like I'm doing now because the Brio line of products are high quality and they're made here in the USA the price tag is higher than a DIY solution but on top of the superior smokeless performance from something like this there's also a bunch of other functionality and things that you can do with this that don't necessarily come with the DIY system and I'll show you what those are towards the end of the video now when I first started the campus shed build project Brio actually reached out and said hey we'd love for you to try one of our fire pits to which I quickly replied sure so they were kind enough to send me this unit free of charge and I am super grateful that they did not only because it saved me some money on a project that is way over budget already but also made me aware of a product that I probably would have kicked myself for not putting in in the first place and to be clear this is not an ad for them at all they just gave me the fire pit and said see how you like it so let's get the rest of the stones in place and see how this thing looks after a light scrub of the stones with a stiff nylon brush I apply a butt ton of landscaping adhesive to hopefully lock these things together I bought six tubes of this stuff and used every drop on this fire pit ring now it was pretty cold out when I did this I wasn't afraid of the adhesive setting up before I could finish I actually found it useful to go back and adjust the placement of some of the stones so I can get everything lined up and snugly fit together now my first thought was to go overboard and use kind of stacked wall stones to create the fire pit ring but coming in at five times the cost I just couldn't make myself do it so these are going to do just fine it's getting to the point in this project where I almost have a spidey sense when I know something just isn't quite right or perhaps that I've made a mistake and so far all the stones around the fire pit look great everything is relatively level but as I went to put on those larger top Stones I quickly realized that I forgot to put on the insert ring which is a solid ring of metal that fits underneath the lip of the fire pit itself which unfortunately means I need to lift this thing out of my now solid ring of rocks and I don't know if you saw me carry this thing over here but it is not light it's about 100 pounds and there's really no way for me to bend over and pick this up now I could get help as I could with many things on this project or I can engineer my way out of it but before I do that if you ever wanted to start a business or a side hustle that's where Shopify the sponsor of this video comes in handy now if you're an alien who just landed here on Earth Shopify is essentially a tool for creating an online business a tool so popular in fact that millions of entrepreneurial earthlings have used it to build online stores about six or seven weeks ago I mentioned that I was building out my own online store using Shopify and well I'm still chipping away at it mostly because the monstrosity of the shed project is eating a lot of my time but I am making progress and I thought it'd be cool to share some behind the scenes updates I'm using a pre-built theme that I paid for to jumpstart my site and the cohesive Vibe of everything so far looks great but I'm quickly figuring out that I just don't have time to be a web designer so I've recently employed the help of a Shopify expert to help me get my site from its current 75 state to the final 100 awesome State and since Shopify is such a popular tool there is a massive talent pool out there ready to help you if you need it now I'm also planning on launching some new merchandise like t-shirts and sweatshirts now I've offered some of these in the past and to be honest it was kind of clunky and just kind of felt flat but what Shopify lets me do is integrate directly with print-on-demand Services you know like bright don't have to hold an inventory and the shirts are printed as their order and that gives me access to a ton of options including shop greatness blankets who doesn't want a shop greatness blanket probably no one actually but the great thing about this is that once my site is live I've got everything in one spot and finally one of the biggest reasons why I'm using Shopify to build out my online store is to enable product bundling and options how cool would it be to have the option to also get a physically printed and spiral bound version of the plans instead of just the PDF that you'd then have to go print yourself the world is my oyster so if you want to learn more or you just want to get started you can do so by using a risk-free free trial by heading to shopify.com shopnation so go check it out thank you to Shopify for sponsoring this video and uh let's get back to it and after a little bit of redneck Ingenuity I was able to safely lift and secure the fire pit above the stone ring [Music] [Music] and to avoid having to trim down one of these stones to fit I adjusted the position of the others until I created an opening exactly one stone wide this top ring ended up requiring 14 stones and after a quick check for level I got the insert ring slid into place so I could then lower the fire pit into its final spot leaving one wrap of rope around the ladder wrong gave me enough friction to let me easily control The Descent with one hand what could have been a nightmare was actually a pretty elegant solution I might just be getting the hang of this working alone stuff after all okay with everything now set in place I decided to kind of grade this High spot down so there wasn't such a drop off to the fire pit then I added a couple more bags of River Rocks around the base to cover up the exposed paver base and to kind of create a nice transition all right with all those details added this thing is now done and I gotta say it's pretty sweet I haven't got this giant stainless steel lid to keep on this thing when we're not using it so that it doesn't fill up with water and get all the ashes all muddy and nasty and as much as I want to start a fire in it right now and start burning all the scraps sitting around the shed I'm actually going to hold off until the end of the video but since we've got the caveman TV set up we can now turn our attention to the actual TV which is going to sit behind this window I'll meet you back at the shop now the plan is to mount the TV inside of an enclosed box that kind of swings out from the inside of the window and this is basically going to serve two purposes one to protect the TV from whatever is going on inside the shed and two the inside of that box is going to be painted a black color so that from the outside when you're looking at the TV all you see is the TV screen you don't see through the shed or light coming through through and since I know you're not here to watch me make a box [Music] Bob's your uncle a box and now all that's left is to get a couple coats of black paint here on the inside followed by mounting a simple TV mount that will attach to my 43 inch TV I decided to add a strip of rubber gasket material around the perimeter to help seal the box when it's closed against the window I'm really just trying to keep any light from peeking through the cracks then after putting up a temporary ledge to help me hold this thing in place I attached it to the framing with some heavy duty gate hinges foreign Bob's your uncle again now it's a swinging box [Music] after realizing that I should level the TV mount in the closed position rather than let the Box wide open I got it secured to the back panel of the Box before hanging the TV into its new home now I noticed the TV kind of tilted down in this setup so I added a little spacer along the bottom to prop it up and keep it parallel with the window then after adding a couple of simple latches to keep it closed and a handle for easy opening I'm calling this thing done all right this is getting exciting now we may only have half a roof up but by God we've got college football by the campfire and an added benefit of the enclosed box that I built is that now there's a big flat wall area where I could potentially hang some lighter stuff so I kind of gained back some wall space that I would have otherwise lost if this was just had a TV sitting right here and as tempting as it is to plug this thing in and try it out there's one more detail I want to get done before we get the full experience and that is to get the cedar tongue and groove soffit installed underneath this porch area step one of doing that involves fixing a mistake I made while framing up the porch these little supports actually extended too far down and needed to be trimmed flush before adding the soffit now I talked about this stuff in part three of this build series but it's just quarter inch thick Cedar tongue and groove paneling really meant for decorative wall covering I think it looks great and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than the full-size tongue and groove cedar planks I was originally looking at and I am going to go through and coat all of the cedar in waterproof sealant meant for decks it probably doesn't need it but oh well oh and I'm securing everything in place with 16 gauge galvanized finish nails all right let's tally up some cost shall we the biggest ticket item in this chapter was actually the 43-inch TV and mount that came in at 323 dollars next up are the rocks and stones to construct the fire pit totaling 278 dollars then all the materials to build the enclosed TV box totaled 150 thanks mostly to one sheet of obscenely expensive plywood next up were the materials for the cedar soffit on the porch which was actually a reasonable 136 dollars and finally for the fire pit insert itself now for the sake of this project I'm just going to list the price of a standard steel insert ring because mine didn't cost me anything but if you want to go the Brio route you'll just have to go price it out for whatever size you need this brings the total for the video to one thousand nine dollars and the running project total to 11 813 dollars foreign [Music] the soffit around the wall Corners off for now because I'm going to have to add trim here later all right this thing is starting to come together and it's crazy how much adding just the cedar soffit here how big of a difference that makes I'm getting really excited for all the finishing touches the siding and everything we still have yet to add and I think now we're about ready to light that fire and get the full experience foreign universal truth that a campfire makes any cold day better really makes most things better and the same is absolutely true of watching college football I just wish I would have built this closer to the beginning of the Season not the end of the season go walls you know I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to see the picture very clearly just being behind the Plexiglas but even at a distance it's plenty bright it's plenty clear and for a little 43 inch TV I can see it from clear on the other side and it wouldn't be a DIY project unless I added colored LEDs so I've got two really cheap LED lights sitting behind the TV on either side that I can control the color of frankly I don't even know if they're going to be bright enough to really make a difference but they were 10 bucks at Walmart so I figure I'd give it a shot and when it comes to sound I'm eventually going to mount two outdoor speakers out here and Route it to the TV but surprisingly if I turn the volume up on the TV I can't hear it from out here so as a temporary measure it's going to work out just fine but you also May notice that there is some smoke coming out of my smokeless fire pit so it must be broken right well not exactly see all smokeless fire pits operate on the same premise that I already explained but to get that secondary combustion you got to get this thing really hot only then will the Super rated air react with the smoke and burn it off you remember those cool features that I said that this thing can do that other DIY pits can't well there's actually attachments you can add to either side of this thing instantly turning it into a cooking station check this this thing out this is The Outpost Grille it's got two spots for one on each side you can swivel your food on and off you can change the height so you can do like steaks Burgers vegetables really whatever you want plus there's other attachments you can hang on that thing to hang like a pot of chili you know so you can feel like a real cowboy now I've just gonna wait for a couple days of dry semi-warm weather to get back on the roof and finish that and then we move on to siding and painting and we're pretty much done I am looking for suggestions however and what I should do with the ground around the fire pitch I do pavers should I do gravel I really wanted to leave it just dirt to make it feel like we're really in the woods but it is a mud pit right now and little kids in mud don't mix so if you got suggestions leave those down below I'll see you guys on the next episode of construction mediocrity and until then keep pursuing shed greatness thank you [Music]

Channel: Shop Nation

Views: 214,621

Keywords: diy smokeless fire pit, smokeless fire pit, fire pit, how to build a fire pit, camphouse shed, shopnation, shop nation, diy fire pit, breeo fire pit, solo stove, fire pit ring, make a fire pit, breeo stone surround, diy solo stove, fire pit in backyard, fire pit ideas, fire ring insert, backyard fire pit, backyard tv ideas, cool shed ideas, shed ideas, she shed, garden shed, shed build, X30, Patio fire pit, best smokeless fire pit, diy smokeless fire pit design

Id: tEoMlKEC53c

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2022