Brick Fire Pits- How to Build a Brick Fire Pit

If you are interested in building your own fire pit, one of the easiest and lowest cost fire pits to build is a brick fire pit. The building materials are smaller and easier to handle than a stone fire pit, and brick is easy to lay out to fit almost any available space. This article gives a few pointers on how to build your own brick fire pit in the back yard.

How to Build Your Own Brick Fire Pit
By John Grant

It’s exciting to cook outdoors now and then. Also, not only is it a pleasant change of pace to standard kitchen food preparation, there is something about cooking outdoors whjich makes the food taste even better.

Sure there is the easy way to do this with a simple store bought BBQ or hibachi, but to truly get a unique experience, a great taste and make the best culinary experience possible you should really consider trying to build a brick fire pit. This really is the best option for outdoor cooking.

And it’s easy to build our own brick fire pit. So set an apt day to do some simple masonry work with the family and follow these seven easy steps.

1. First, we choose a site in our backyard for our brick fire pit. It should be a safe distance from the walls of the house, from the roof, from windows, and from trees. The site should be easy to drain.

2. Dig the pad. It should be 2 to 4 inches deep. As to its size, we decide according to our preferred dimension. Level the pad base of our brick fire pit.

3. We make the forms using 2 by 4 feet woods and screw them together. Screwing makes them easy to disassemble. Then we prepare quick-set cement according to specified mix proportions as indicated on the bag and pour into the pad foundation of our brick fire pit. Then set steel bars in a latus pattern into the concrete before it sets, put a key mark in the concrete and ready the brick fire pit wall plan.

4. Prepare the cement mortar. The usual proportion is 3:1, or 3 parts of sand to 1 part of cement. A stronger ratio is 2:1. The idea is to have a consistency easy to work with-like soft ice cream. Take care not to have it too watery. Mortar for our brick fire pit should be mixed well to attain a balance of components.

5. Build the brick fire pit wall. To lay the bricks, put enough mortar on our key mark including the underside and ends of the bricks. The bricks should steadily rest on the mortar. Adjust until they are standing upright and sturdily on the mortar. Do this level by level with the aid of a string for alignment.

6. The string should be perfectly horizontal and the top edge of the bricks parallel to it. We may also use a Leveler for this purpose. A brick should be on top another in an overlapping (not directly over) manner. Overlap should be half the brick size. This strengthens our brick fire pit.

7. For metal grills, insert them within the brick fire pit walls at a desired height. The top of the wall may be capped with special bricks or stones.

So there we have it. A day after the brick fire pit is constructed it’s ready for use. We can start enjoying outdoor grills with the family and friends.

John Grant is a the author for a how to site where he is writing articles about how to build a brick fire pit.

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