Rectangular Fire Pit Design Ideas
Hey, I’m Sandy and I’m Andy and today we are going to be talking to you about how to build a rectangular fire pit. For the best budget friendly home improvement advice where you can save more so that you can do more- Subscribe below and let’s get started today.
I asked my sweet Andy to join me because he was my co-builder in how to build a rectangular fire pit. We built ours four years ago and I asked him to help me pick the design. We were in Home Depot and he came up with something brilliant. I thought he did all the math and he did. How did you find our design?
I was cruising around Home Depot and they had designs to choose from so we liked the square one that they had this big chunky brick.
We found a simple flyer that gave you this list and you go buy it and we did. There was no huge math involved. It costs us about $150.
Two Tips to Consider when building a rectangular fire pit.
We did find two things that we are trying to warn you about before you watched the video of how to build a rectangular fire pit.
First- The adhesive that we use in the video isn’t the correct one. He recently, when he went back to the store to buy the six replacement bricks that we needed, found the tube and read the back. And what did it specifically stick?
It looked like I was on the right track. It is landscaping adhesive and it’s good for brick and block and concrete but what I noticed is it says do not use on fire pits and they’re not joking. I’m a witness that it doesn’t work, it crumbles and it falls apart.
Second- we made the decision four years ago not to buy the liner. If you want a liner, you can order them online. They are not available, at least at our store, they’re not available. But it was about $100 to $150 extra to the cost of the rectangular fire pit that we weren’t willing to do four years ago.
However, in hindsight, we did burn through our bricks, six of them cracked, the top row. We use our rectangular fire pit pretty often. So those are just two things that we wanted to let you know as you watch the video.
We’re going to kind of comment a little bit because nobody likes to watch people building a brick fireplace. We want you to know that beforehand so that if this is a project that you’re doing, know that it’s $150 and you can do it in less than a day.
Organizing Your Fire Pit Blocks
Once we got the bricks in our car and we went home and there have been times where we’d been at the store where we had loaded the back of the car down. That was not the case with this. We lined them up according to the size as you’ll see the stack that we have so that it will just make it easier.
Level the Ground
Now the ground that we, where we chose to have it already had a foundation of gravel, but it also had a, we never had to tamp it down or anything like that. It was already level. We did have a fire pit there earlier, a cheap one. So before you start, you need to have a nice level spot to put these bricks down.
If somebody did have to level their land, would they have to cut the grass out and do a layer of gravel and sand? Like is there a prep that you do have to do if you’re going to do a fire? I wouldn’t do it right on grass or you could take your grass and add probably sand so that you could get it level to start with. Okay. But you definitely need a level of fire, pit or level area.
Build Your Design Row by Row
We took our design and we started laying it out. If you see, we varied from the size of brick that we did and we made sure, well you made sure that as we were going around it was as straight as possible. As we went around the three corners and came back to meet the end, that’s when you kind of can see that we are out of square. So the only tools that you did bring out for this project were the framing square and an L shaped square. You don’t need to measure things for this project. You get to eye it up.
Yeah!!!
Those are the only tools you need. The biggest thing that you told me was the bottom level was really the only one that we had to have. That was to be level.
Make sure they don’t rock when you put them down. They need to be stable. The first level will take about 13 minutes.
After that first level is done the second level goes right on top then the third level. It really goes fast.
If you aren’t sure what design you would like, CLICK HERE for Fire Pit ideas.
Design Corrected
When we did finish it, and you won’t see this as something that kind of came up afterwards, it was kind of a flaw in our design. There was no heat that came out the bottom because we had bricked it in.
We removed one of the bricks and it did allow the air flow. Fire likes oxygen and air. Right. So unless you’re feeding the bottom of it with that, if I was not going to be as good. So, um, yeah, we actually removed a couple of the small bricks to let some into the bottom and help the fire out a little bit.
Kid-Friendly Project
You can clearly see that if you have kids. This was definitely family friendly. It was a family involved project. You see our kid, our four year old at the time, was the foreman telling us exactly what to do. This is a great project because there’s so little tools involved. It was pretty quick that they would, what did we say? Less than an hour we were done once he got everything in position
Roast Marshmallows When Complete
And if you have to bribe your kids, you know, have them work and tell them that they’re going to have marshmallows at the end of the marshmallows. We are totally into bribery when it comes to building stuff. I’ll see if I can add some pictures of, we did have a fire pit or we had a fire afterwards and we marched marshmallow, I’m not sure if you marshmallow. We cooked marshmallows, we roasted marshmallows over the fire and we had some smores. So it was a great fun activity that you can do.
Budget-Friendly Design and Cost
In our opinion, we may have sprung for the rectangular shell for the inside. You can not get it at your local hardware store. You have to order it online, even from home Depot and Lowe’s. They didn’t have any in our store. They might in yours, but we might have ordered one to help with the preservation of the bricks or would you kind of say, well, to replace six is still less than to buy a $150 liner.
If we had used the right adhesive or blue to put them together, I don’t, it may have lasted better. I think that the shield, the metal sleeve is to keep the bricks from getting so hot.
Something that you might want to consider, it’ll up your cost a little bit. But again, we’ve been able to have this for 4 years and we love it.
This is just a quick summary of how to build a rectangular fire pit within less than a day for $150, which we thought was a really good bargain for the amount of time that we use it.
We hope that you have enjoyed our video. We hope that you’ve learned something and let us know if you end up doing a fire pit. If you use this one, awesome. And if you don’t and you go out and buy one, we want to know which one you did, and what you learned like we did as you built it.
We hope that you have a great day and make sure that you subscribe and continue to follow us. And if you would share this video to somebody who you know wants to build a fire pit, that would be awesome.
