A Perfect Fire Pit: A DIY Project to Enhance Outdoor Living Space

We built this patio a few years back and we like to eat dinner out here. Sometimes, we like to have a fire by the fire pit. All right, so this is the fire pit. Yeah, we're looking for something to upgrade and you know that it's getting old. It's getting rusty. We'd love to replace it with something more permanent.

Fire pits can really run the gamut. They can be super inexpensive and just give you four or five fires a year all the way up to something that's super expensive. A few years ago, on the show Jen actually put a fire pit together using four pieces of granite so it was beautiful but they can get pretty pricey. We're not looking to go that high with the budget.

Okay, so I know if we go down to the Home Center where they have these Precast blocks, they're actually cut in such a way that they're going to make a circle which again is a desirable fire pit. So, I think we should probably start there. That sounds excellent.

Let's go foreign... (laughs) What we've done is I've taken the metal ring that we're going to use when we're done and I laid the first course block dry. This will do a couple things for us most importantly it's going to give us the location where we are. Yeah, this is a great spot it's set back from the patio and far away from the trees so we don't have to worry about the fire coming up.

So, the next thing is to dig. Grab your shovel and what we're going to do is dig around the block and we're going to stay off the block by three inches. So, once we're done making this cut we're going to remove the first Corsa block. We're going to remove the ring and then we're going to dig out our pit. As we're digging just make sure to save some grass because once we put our fire pit in we're going to need to patch our lawn into the block.

Mark, how deep do we need to go? The manufacturer wants us to go down two inches but in New England I like a little drainage so we're going to go down a little deeper. Maybe eight inches. Foreign right there. Right up all right now this is two inch Trap Rock which is very good for our drainage.

Why is it important that we have drainage underneath the pit? We get a rainstorm and water goes into the pit we want it to be able to drain through the Trap Rock and into the soil and disperse itself if we're going to want to pack it with a hand tamper every two inches. You know how you know when we're ready for the next course? You got a minute to go? It's gonna feel very solid it's not going to bounce the way it's bouncing right now so keep hammering down flip it in great foreign.

Course it's the paver base and all it is is a mixture of three-quarter inch Stone and stone dust. All you're going to do is rake it out and then we'll level it off. So, we're going to put our ring back in and just like before we're going to use this as a template because we're going to do the most important thing on the job so far and that's set our first block which is very very important. We want to make sure it's Level side to side that's perfect.

Actually, we're going to go front to back and make sure that's level I got to tap down a bit all right I'm level there now we're going to level the whole first course off of that one block don't forget the next two courses go off of this. We're not going to use the level too much on those courses so that's why it's critical to get every single block as perfectly level as possible perfect.

So, what we've done is we've laid our second course but we've laid it dry so we're going to peel back this block call it our first block and you're going to give me some construction adhesive right across here and right across here and I'll put the block back in. I'm going to wiggle this one into place and we're going to do this the entire way around the rim.

For the third course, we're going to do the same as we did for the second course going to lay them in dry and then we're going to use the adhesive. Now, we're going to fill up the bottom of the pit with lava rock. You dump I'll stretch all right so the last piece of this whole puzzle is just to take the grass patch it back into the lawn so like we were never there.

What do you think? Jim, this is awesome. Mark, thank you. We had fun today right. We did yeah I love it cheers cheers.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday on ask This Old House we're focusing on some of our favorite summertime projects in Colorado I'll help a family build a brand new swing set exactly the way they want it and we can get some hand and foot holes to make it like a rock wall climbing up that sounds pretty great the hardest part of keeping up with a garden is watering I'm headed to Raleigh North Carolina with a solution so what we want to do is Soak this to give all these new plantings a great start okay and installing a masonry fire pit can really upgrade your backyard I'll show you how to do it this is awesome mark thank you hi Jim hey Tom welcome to Colorado thank you nice to be here this is quite a neighborhood you have here oh thank you what brought you to this part of the country uh well my wife and I moved here in 2013 right after we got married and then in 2016 we decided to buy a house she was very pregnant at the time so we didn't have a lot of chance to do upgrades to the house okay but my son's birthday is coming up and we wrote hoping that you might be able to help us with a swing set in the back well I think I can do that why don't you leave me the way take it this way and we'll take a look and see what you have Tommy this is my wife Valerie hi Valerie how are you nice to meet you and who is this oh this is Charlie hi Charlie are you going to slide down on a slide for me yeah okay let's see let's see I'm Ready Set Go whoa all right how about a high five oh good job all right so I take it this is the slide that you want to upgrade yeah that's right as you can see Charlie's kind of outgrown it yeah and they grow up fast don't they all right so what's your idea of what you want to do so we're looking for a swing set uh with a slide built in and we're thinking putting it back in the the back third of the the grass here but the problem is we've got a slope and a pitch to the yard and we don't know how to take care of that yeah it definitely does have a pitch and a slope I think having it back here where you want it parallel to the fence because the slope is pretty gradual there we do have some steepness here but right if you guys both want to help out do we have anybody that can take care of Charlie yep all right why don't they get some tools and we can get started sounds good all right Jim here's what I want to use to build your swing set and it starts with this kit right here that I got at the Home Center for a little under a hundred dollars and in the kit we have a couple of swings a set of rings and all the hardware and brackets that you need to mount it to the wood now you can always add a slide or a climbing wall later or maybe even another swing on the other side but it gives you that option now the wood frame obviously doesn't come with the kit we're going to use a western red cedar which is really a nice wood for outdoors it weathers nice and it holds up to the weather and it'll get a nice weathered gray over time oh yeah it smells and looks great yeah we're going to start by marking the locations for all the holes that we have to drill across the top beam that's going to carry our swings and to our A-frame we'll need to make sure that the marks are in the center of the beam and then we can drill the holes it's important that the drill stays Square in both directions so we'll use a speed square to guide it okay now I want you to pull it up that empties out the twist keep it out pull it right out emptied out all right now go back in again so that just cleaned out the drip okay perfect nice job I flipped the beam over and now we can install the t-nuts that will hold the hardware that holds the swing I'll just slide them in and then you can drive them home with a hammer okay so now we're just going to tip it on its side like that and we're going to take these brackets that are going to hold our swings and we're going to thread those up through the hole so the first thing I need to do is take this Square washer put it on there like that and push it into the hole and screw it into the t-nut thank you all right so we have them on that's good okay so now we're going to just tip it up and we're going to take a screwdriver and put it in there right in here and we're going to use the screwdriver as leverage and we'll bring it around and turn it and what's going to happen we have to make sure we keep this slot now in that eye that's going to come around like this once we get down in there it's going to dig into the wood just like that a little more right there oh all right so that's good yeah all right so our slot is holding it and that's great all right so now what we're going to do is we're going to take these screws so our bracket will stay in place and we're going to screw through each hole and put four screws okay up on top on this one our structure is made of three A-frames perfect legs of each are four by fours with a two by six across after I build one we use that as a template to build the other perfect all right right there nice and slow on your start the two by six braces are secured to the four by fours using four inch screws this bracket that comes with the kit holds the legs together at the top and attaches it to the Cross Beam good another one here let's load them up on one end of the swing set we need to build a platform for the top of the slide I want to leave a little gap between the boards to allow the rain water to run out and also for the boards to slide yeah yeah that's the idea now you walk down that side our platform will be supported by two of the A-frames using more of the four inch screw we'll pivot it right around just like that perfect we'll put it up here like this nice all right let's carry this last a over here through now this a is going to go this way like that all right good and I'm going to slide this Carriage bolt through here and through this first hole and get it in there first slide it through now I can get a nut and a washer started on this one okay now we get the other one in okay get another nut and washer on that one and I'll tighten that up okay Valerie you want to go around the other side pick that four by six up foreign pull it in hold it hold it not too fast okay now let's get the other two on it's good all right I think we're ready to tilt it up okay so you grab that A-frame there put your foot right on the bottom you're gonna have to pull hard on that a and you and I will push this up on three ready one two three there we go okay how about that right there all right let's take a look see how it looks now it is following the slope of the land you can see it coming down this way and pitching forward just a little bit this way now I can level it and level it we can do it a couple of different ways we can cut the back legs off as needed or you can dig holes and put it in the ground that way if I cut the legs and we put it there that means you're limited on where you can put this on the land you can never move it yeah I don't know about you Valerie but I think it looks really great where it is I think it's positioned well and it seems like it'll still be sturdy and safe right there and if you want to level it later you can always dig a couple of holes in the back and just push it down a little bit we can do that that works all right good let's finish it up let's add some two by fours for railings at the top of the platform all right that's all yours now here's the slide that I picked I picked the bumpy one so I don't know if Charlie would like that but they have a couple of different ones to choose from but I think you'd like that he loves to bounce the top of the slide just screws in place to the platform but I'm adding some stakes in the ground to keep the bottom of the slide from slipping all right that's it for the slide now to get to the slide I think we have a couple of different options we can take some two bytes like this and place like one here maybe another here and another one down here to make a ladder to climb up oh we can take a bunch of them and put them close together all the way down and we can get some hand and foot holes to make it like a rock wall climbing up well that sounds pretty great yeah we are in Colorado all right let's do that foreign what do you think you like that swing set pretty cool huh Charlie look at that there you go ready set whoa all right high five yay like you say thank you Tommy you're welcome thank you so much for coming to Colorado and helping us we really appreciate it it was my pleasure and it's a lot of fun foreign thank you so much for coming to Raleigh Jenn we're so excited you're here I am so excited to be here you guys have a lovely house really great backyard and it clearly looks like you do many activities back here yeah we have two boys at ten and seven we play baseball basketball soccer we do a little bit of everything and the one thing that we're trying to get them into is to start help them with gardening okay yeah we love the idea of it and we sort of get to this point where we get all our plants and vegetables and they spend all this money at the store we have a whole family gathering we plan everything we're super excited about it and then we go on vacation and we come back and everything's dead well summertime is the perfect time to grow vegetables but it does require water and the problem I think you guys are having is when you're out of school you'd like to try to go away in your situation I'm thinking that we start from scratch sounds great let's get the old raised beds out of the way and level the soil that's here foreign the kit that you had before for your raised beds is totally fine but I want to switch it up a little bit these are two by stock of Western red cedar okay they're great they're naturally rot resistant and they're chemical free these are the corner braces and they are designed to accept all two by pieces you secure them with screws on these insides and then you slide it right back over like that and then one of the four corners is going to have irrigation on it you attach the garden hose to here and up here is an attachment for the soaker hose so you screw that in here and then you weave the soaker hose throughout the bed and here's the game changer this is an irrigation timer so what you do is you attach it to the spigot on the house you set it for what time you would like it to go off and the duration of time it's an amazing tool and it's going to allow you to go away on vacation and come back to plants that are alive perfect yes let's drill some pilot holes in the wood before screwing the brackets in and these caps finish off the edges looks level to me all right thank you boom this is landscape fabric I just want to create a barrier between the ground to keep all the weeds out now we can add the soil since you're growing vegetables in the garden I prefer to use an organic raised garden bed mix this is a beef steak tomato okay yeah tomato sandwiches what about these two front Corners let's do strawberries all right so let's put the basil on the ends okay so we have oregano we have thyme and I'm gonna put these two Thai basil plants right here all right let's do the tomatoes first and it's okay if it falls apart a little bit because we're going to stick them right in the ground that looks good some of these have roots that you need to tease up so you just kind of break them up a little bit so they can reach out into the soil instead of growing in the circle like the shape of the pot all right okay foreign here's where the water is going to come out this is the adapter this is where the soaker hose is going to go in so it has teeth right here so we're going to slide the soaker in there okay all the way you can and then going to tighten this cap just like that that's tightened and then this just go into here and just thread it on it's nice and tight all right so what we're going to do I'm going to give you the end okay we're going to Loop it around this bed so I'm gonna yeah we'll send it down that way first harder than I expected it to be just weave it back down through the center I'm going to put one of these staples in put one in here to secure it and here okay nice curve you want to put one of these landscape staples in all right perfect so at the end of the hose we're just going to cap it off similar to how we put it in on the other side we have these teeth going to insert the soaker hose into it tighten the cap and so that way it doesn't spray out the bottom all right Mark's sending this through that's good yeah we'll readjust the slack later okay so stick it in here and then yep and then twist that this top part to thread it on okay okay so we have the hose set up to the timer uh at the spigot at the house it's connected here and all you have to do is turn it on here all right oh wow so it looks like you have really good water pressure so what we want to do is Soak this to give all these new plantings a great start okay do you guys have any questions for me yeah I was wondering so I know right now we soak it but for like after today how long do we leave it on and how many times a day should we set the timer for that kind of stuff so that magical timer we could set it for however long we want and what I'm recommending is once in the morning and once in the evening so we should watch how long it takes to get to a good soaking period and then you could set your minutes say maybe start with 10 or 15 minutes at each cycle sounds good thank you so much for coming to Raleigh Jen it was a pleasure take care foreign space yeah we love it back here we've been here for about seven years and uh it's a great place to hang out we built this patio a few years back we like to eat dinner out here and sometimes we like to have a fire by the fire pit all right ah so this is the fire pit yeah we're looking for something to upgrade and you know this is sort of a temporary thing for us it's getting old it's getting rusty we'd love to replace it with something more permanent all right well you know these fire pits can really run the gamut they can be super inexpensive and just give you four or five fires a year all the way up to something that's super expensive a few years ago on the show Jen actually put a fire pit together using four pieces of granite so it was beautiful but they can get pretty pricey yeah we're not looking to go that high with the budget okay so I know if we go down to the Home Center where they have these Precast blocks they're actually cut in such a way that they're going to make a circle which again is a desirable fire pit so I think we should probably start there that sounds excellent all right let's go foreign so what we've done is I've taken the metal ring that we're going to use when we're done and we've used it as a template and I laid the first course block dry that's going to do a couple things for us most importantly it's going to give us the location you like where we are yeah this is a great spot it's set back from the patio and far away from the trees so we don't have to worry about the fire coming up all right that's great so the next thing is to dig so grab your shovel and what we're going to do is dig around the block and we're going to stay off the block by three inches so once we're done making this cut we're going to remove the first Corsa block we're going to remove the ring and then we're going to dig out our pit so as we're digging just make sure to save some grass because once we put our fire pit in we're going to need to patch our lawn into the block so Mark how deep do we need to go the manufacturer wants us to go down two inches but in New England I like a little drainage so we're going to go down a little deeper maybe eight inches foreign right there right up all right now this is two inch Trap Rock which is very good for our drainage why is it important that we have drainage underneath the pit we get a rainstorm and water goes into the pit we want it to be able to drain through the Trap Rock and into the soil and disperse itself if we're going to want to pack it with a hand tamper every two inches how do you know when we're ready for the next uh course uh you got a minute to go it's gonna feel uh very solid it's not going to bounce the way it's bouncing right now so keep hammering down flip it in great foreign course it's the paver base and all it is is a mixture of three-quarter inch Stone and stone dust all you're going to do is rake it out and then we'll level it off all right so we're going to put our ring back in and just like before we're going to use this as a template because we're going to do the most important thing on the job so far and that's set our first block which is very very important we want to make sure it's Level side to side that's perfect actually we're going to go front to back and make sure that's level I got to tap down a bit all right I'm level there now we're going to level the whole first course off of that one block don't forget the next two courses go off of this we're not going to use the level too much on those courses so that's why it's critical to get every single block as perfectly level as possible perfect so what we've done is we've laid our second course but we've laid it dry so we're going to peel back this block call it our first block and you're going to give me some construction adhesive right across here and right across here and I'll put the block back in I'm going to wiggle this one into place and we're going to do this the entire way around the rim for the third course we're going to do the same as we did for the second course going to lay them in dry and then we're going to use the adhesive so now we're going to fill up the bottom of the pit with lava rock you dump I'll stretch all right so the last piece of this whole puzzle Jim is just to take the grass patch it back into the lawn so like we were never there what do you think Jim this is awesome mark thank you we had fun today right we did yeah I love it cheers cheerstoday on ask This Old House we're focusing on some of our favorite summertime projects in Colorado I'll help a family build a brand new swing set exactly the way they want it and we can get some hand and foot holes to make it like a rock wall climbing up that sounds pretty great the hardest part of keeping up with a garden is watering I'm headed to Raleigh North Carolina with a solution so what we want to do is Soak this to give all these new plantings a great start okay and installing a masonry fire pit can really upgrade your backyard I'll show you how to do it this is awesome mark thank you hi Jim hey Tom welcome to Colorado thank you nice to be here this is quite a neighborhood you have here oh thank you what brought you to this part of the country uh well my wife and I moved here in 2013 right after we got married and then in 2016 we decided to buy a house she was very pregnant at the time so we didn't have a lot of chance to do upgrades to the house okay but my son's birthday is coming up and we wrote hoping that you might be able to help us with a swing set in the back well I think I can do that why don't you leave me the way take it this way and we'll take a look and see what you have Tommy this is my wife Valerie hi Valerie how are you nice to meet you and who is this oh this is Charlie hi Charlie are you going to slide down on a slide for me yeah okay let's see let's see I'm Ready Set Go whoa all right how about a high five oh good job all right so I take it this is the slide that you want to upgrade yeah that's right as you can see Charlie's kind of outgrown it yeah and they grow up fast don't they all right so what's your idea of what you want to do so we're looking for a swing set uh with a slide built in and we're thinking putting it back in the the back third of the the grass here but the problem is we've got a slope and a pitch to the yard and we don't know how to take care of that yeah it definitely does have a pitch and a slope I think having it back here where you want it parallel to the fence because the slope is pretty gradual there we do have some steepness here but right if you guys both want to help out do we have anybody that can take care of Charlie yep all right why don't they get some tools and we can get started sounds good all right Jim here's what I want to use to build your swing set and it starts with this kit right here that I got at the Home Center for a little under a hundred dollars and in the kit we have a couple of swings a set of rings and all the hardware and brackets that you need to mount it to the wood now you can always add a slide or a climbing wall later or maybe even another swing on the other side but it gives you that option now the wood frame obviously doesn't come with the kit we're going to use a western red cedar which is really a nice wood for outdoors it weathers nice and it holds up to the weather and it'll get a nice weathered gray over time oh yeah it smells and looks great yeah we're going to start by marking the locations for all the holes that we have to drill across the top beam that's going to carry our swings and to our A-frame we'll need to make sure that the marks are in the center of the beam and then we can drill the holes it's important that the drill stays Square in both directions so we'll use a speed square to guide it okay now I want you to pull it up that empties out the twist keep it out pull it right out emptied out all right now go back in again so that just cleaned out the drip okay perfect nice job I flipped the beam over and now we can install the t-nuts that will hold the hardware that holds the swing I'll just slide them in and then you can drive them home with a hammer okay so now we're just going to tip it on its side like that and we're going to take these brackets that are going to hold our swings and we're going to thread those up through the hole so the first thing I need to do is take this Square washer put it on there like that and push it into the hole and screw it into the t-nut thank you all right so we have them on that's good okay so now we're going to just tip it up and we're going to take a screwdriver and put it in there right in here and we're going to use the screwdriver as leverage and we'll bring it around and turn it and what's going to happen we have to make sure we keep this slot now in that eye that's going to come around like this once we get down in there it's going to dig into the wood just like that a little more right there oh all right so that's good yeah all right so our slot is holding it and that's great all right so now what we're going to do is we're going to take these screws so our bracket will stay in place and we're going to screw through each hole and put four screws okay up on top on this one our structure is made of three A-frames perfect legs of each are four by fours with a two by six across after I build one we use that as a template to build the other perfect all right right there nice and slow on your start the two by six braces are secured to the four by fours using four inch screws this bracket that comes with the kit holds the legs together at the top and attaches it to the Cross Beam good another one here let's load them up on one end of the swing set we need to build a platform for the top of the slide I want to leave a little gap between the boards to allow the rain water to run out and also for the boards to slide yeah yeah that's the idea now you walk down that side our platform will be supported by two of the A-frames using more of the four inch screw we'll pivot it right around just like that perfect we'll put it up here like this nice all right let's carry this last a over here through now this a is going to go this way like that all right good and I'm going to slide this Carriage bolt through here and through this first hole and get it in there first slide it through now I can get a nut and a washer started on this one okay now we get the other one in okay get another nut and washer on that one and I'll tighten that up okay Valerie you want to go around the other side pick that four by six up foreign pull it in hold it hold it not too fast okay now let's get the other two on it's good all right I think we're ready to tilt it up okay so you grab that A-frame there put your foot right on the bottom you're gonna have to pull hard on that a and you and I will push this up on three ready one two three there we go okay how about that right there all right let's take a look see how it looks now it is following the slope of the land you can see it coming down this way and pitching forward just a little bit this way now I can level it and level it we can do it a couple of different ways we can cut the back legs off as needed or you can dig holes and put it in the ground that way if I cut the legs and we put it there that means you're limited on where you can put this on the land you can never move it yeah I don't know about you Valerie but I think it looks really great where it is I think it's positioned well and it seems like it'll still be sturdy and safe right there and if you want to level it later you can always dig a couple of holes in the back and just push it down a little bit we can do that that works all right good let's finish it up let's add some two by fours for railings at the top of the platform all right that's all yours now here's the slide that I picked I picked the bumpy one so I don't know if Charlie would like that but they have a couple of different ones to choose from but I think you'd like that he loves to bounce the top of the slide just screws in place to the platform but I'm adding some stakes in the ground to keep the bottom of the slide from slipping all right that's it for the slide now to get to the slide I think we have a couple of different options we can take some two bytes like this and place like one here maybe another here and another one down here to make a ladder to climb up oh we can take a bunch of them and put them close together all the way down and we can get some hand and foot holes to make it like a rock wall climbing up well that sounds pretty great yeah we are in Colorado all right let's do that foreign what do you think you like that swing set pretty cool huh Charlie look at that there you go ready set whoa all right high five yay like you say thank you Tommy you're welcome thank you so much for coming to Colorado and helping us we really appreciate it it was my pleasure and it's a lot of fun foreign thank you so much for coming to Raleigh Jenn we're so excited you're here I am so excited to be here you guys have a lovely house really great backyard and it clearly looks like you do many activities back here yeah we have two boys at ten and seven we play baseball basketball soccer we do a little bit of everything and the one thing that we're trying to get them into is to start help them with gardening okay yeah we love the idea of it and we sort of get to this point where we get all our plants and vegetables and they spend all this money at the store we have a whole family gathering we plan everything we're super excited about it and then we go on vacation and we come back and everything's dead well summertime is the perfect time to grow vegetables but it does require water and the problem I think you guys are having is when you're out of school you'd like to try to go away in your situation I'm thinking that we start from scratch sounds great let's get the old raised beds out of the way and level the soil that's here foreign the kit that you had before for your raised beds is totally fine but I want to switch it up a little bit these are two by stock of Western red cedar okay they're great they're naturally rot resistant and they're chemical free these are the corner braces and they are designed to accept all two by pieces you secure them with screws on these insides and then you slide it right back over like that and then one of the four corners is going to have irrigation on it you attach the garden hose to here and up here is an attachment for the soaker hose so you screw that in here and then you weave the soaker hose throughout the bed and here's the game changer this is an irrigation timer so what you do is you attach it to the spigot on the house you set it for what time you would like it to go off and the duration of time it's an amazing tool and it's going to allow you to go away on vacation and come back to plants that are alive perfect yes let's drill some pilot holes in the wood before screwing the brackets in and these caps finish off the edges looks level to me all right thank you boom this is landscape fabric I just want to create a barrier between the ground to keep all the weeds out now we can add the soil since you're growing vegetables in the garden I prefer to use an organic raised garden bed mix this is a beef steak tomato okay yeah tomato sandwiches what about these two front Corners let's do strawberries all right so let's put the basil on the ends okay so we have oregano we have thyme and I'm gonna put these two Thai basil plants right here all right let's do the tomatoes first and it's okay if it falls apart a little bit because we're going to stick them right in the ground that looks good some of these have roots that you need to tease up so you just kind of break them up a little bit so they can reach out into the soil instead of growing in the circle like the shape of the pot all right okay foreign here's where the water is going to come out this is the adapter this is where the soaker hose is going to go in so it has teeth right here so we're going to slide the soaker in there okay all the way you can and then going to tighten this cap just like that that's tightened and then this just go into here and just thread it on it's nice and tight all right so what we're going to do I'm going to give you the end okay we're going to Loop it around this bed so I'm gonna yeah we'll send it down that way first harder than I expected it to be just weave it back down through the center I'm going to put one of these staples in put one in here to secure it and here okay nice curve you want to put one of these landscape staples in all right perfect so at the end of the hose we're just going to cap it off similar to how we put it in on the other side we have these teeth going to insert the soaker hose into it tighten the cap and so that way it doesn't spray out the bottom all right Mark's sending this through that's good yeah we'll readjust the slack later okay so stick it in here and then yep and then twist that this top part to thread it on okay okay so we have the hose set up to the timer uh at the spigot at the house it's connected here and all you have to do is turn it on here all right oh wow so it looks like you have really good water pressure so what we want to do is Soak this to give all these new plantings a great start okay do you guys have any questions for me yeah I was wondering so I know right now we soak it but for like after today how long do we leave it on and how many times a day should we set the timer for that kind of stuff so that magical timer we could set it for however long we want and what I'm recommending is once in the morning and once in the evening so we should watch how long it takes to get to a good soaking period and then you could set your minutes say maybe start with 10 or 15 minutes at each cycle sounds good thank you so much for coming to Raleigh Jen it was a pleasure take care foreign space yeah we love it back here we've been here for about seven years and uh it's a great place to hang out we built this patio a few years back we like to eat dinner out here and sometimes we like to have a fire by the fire pit all right ah so this is the fire pit yeah we're looking for something to upgrade and you know this is sort of a temporary thing for us it's getting old it's getting rusty we'd love to replace it with something more permanent all right well you know these fire pits can really run the gamut they can be super inexpensive and just give you four or five fires a year all the way up to something that's super expensive a few years ago on the show Jen actually put a fire pit together using four pieces of granite so it was beautiful but they can get pretty pricey yeah we're not looking to go that high with the budget okay so I know if we go down to the Home Center where they have these Precast blocks they're actually cut in such a way that they're going to make a circle which again is a desirable fire pit so I think we should probably start there that sounds excellent all right let's go foreign so what we've done is I've taken the metal ring that we're going to use when we're done and we've used it as a template and I laid the first course block dry that's going to do a couple things for us most importantly it's going to give us the location you like where we are yeah this is a great spot it's set back from the patio and far away from the trees so we don't have to worry about the fire coming up all right that's great so the next thing is to dig so grab your shovel and what we're going to do is dig around the block and we're going to stay off the block by three inches so once we're done making this cut we're going to remove the first Corsa block we're going to remove the ring and then we're going to dig out our pit so as we're digging just make sure to save some grass because once we put our fire pit in we're going to need to patch our lawn into the block so Mark how deep do we need to go the manufacturer wants us to go down two inches but in New England I like a little drainage so we're going to go down a little deeper maybe eight inches foreign right there right up all right now this is two inch Trap Rock which is very good for our drainage why is it important that we have drainage underneath the pit we get a rainstorm and water goes into the pit we want it to be able to drain through the Trap Rock and into the soil and disperse itself if we're going to want to pack it with a hand tamper every two inches how do you know when we're ready for the next uh course uh you got a minute to go it's gonna feel uh very solid it's not going to bounce the way it's bouncing right now so keep hammering down flip it in great foreign course it's the paver base and all it is is a mixture of three-quarter inch Stone and stone dust all you're going to do is rake it out and then we'll level it off all right so we're going to put our ring back in and just like before we're going to use this as a template because we're going to do the most important thing on the job so far and that's set our first block which is very very important we want to make sure it's Level side to side that's perfect actually we're going to go front to back and make sure that's level I got to tap down a bit all right I'm level there now we're going to level the whole first course off of that one block don't forget the next two courses go off of this we're not going to use the level too much on those courses so that's why it's critical to get every single block as perfectly level as possible perfect so what we've done is we've laid our second course but we've laid it dry so we're going to peel back this block call it our first block and you're going to give me some construction adhesive right across here and right across here and I'll put the block back in I'm going to wiggle this one into place and we're going to do this the entire way around the rim for the third course we're going to do the same as we did for the second course going to lay them in dry and then we're going to use the adhesive so now we're going to fill up the bottom of the pit with lava rock you dump I'll stretch all right so the last piece of this whole puzzle Jim is just to take the grass patch it back into the lawn so like we were never there what do you think Jim this is awesome mark thank you we had fun today right we did yeah I love it cheers cheers\n"