Fire Pit DIY- Are you ready to buy or Build?
Are you torn between buying or building a fire pit? Today we’re going to discuss those pros and cons and by the end of this video, I hope you’ll have a decision. If you aren’t ready for a fire pit but you have other DIY projects, for ideas CLICK HERE.
We give budget friendly home improvement advice so that you can save more to do more. I think that we can all agree that a fire pit is the quintessential symbol of relaxation for the summer. I don’t know about you, but I love it. It doesn’t matter whether I’m camping, at the beach, on my back porch, or in my backyard, I love a fire pit.
Who’s with me? Today we’re going to talk about the Pros and Cons to a DIY fire pit. You have a plethora of choices that you can buy or you have a plethora of decisions to make if you’re going to build a DIY fire pit.
Today we’re going to talk about those Pros and Cons. Our Pinterest page has many ideas for you to consider. CLICK HERE for inspiration.
Pros and cons to building or buying a Fire pit
First I wanted to discuss and show you a couple pictures of the fire pits that we’re talking about today. Fire pits come in all shapes and sizes. You have circles, you have squares, rectangles, and you have chimneys. I’m going to put a chiminea in this category, although I have never seen anybody make a chimney, we will talk about that later, but there are a variety.
Once you figured out the shape that you want, there’s a variety of ways to fuel the fire pit either by wood or using some type of gas or propane. Another thing that we wanted to discuss is the type of materials that fire pits come in. You can have cement, clay, metal, pavers.
You can have pavers with stone, geometric shapes, steel with slats, copper, glass. You could have a starter frame that’s either circular or square and build up from there or at some festivals you can even buy decorative frames.
Pros to Buying a Fire Pit
Let’s break down five reasons why there are some pros to buying a fire pit.
The first one is if you have problem visualizing what the end product’s going to be, you don’t normally have to do that when something is either pictured or right in front of you at the start.
Number two is that it takes pretty much unwrapping it and putting it in the place where you’re going to have it little assembling.
My third point is assembly, it’s typically pretty easy.
Number four, there is minimal effort to select and purchase your product. You go in, you’ll look at it, you look online, press the button, boom, it’s here, delivered at your doorstep, and
Five, a lot of times the items that come with it, you can visualize that as well so it goes back to number one, but a lot of the stones or the gems that come with it, they’re really pretty and you don’t have to go out and shop, they’re there for you.
Those are five things that I think are pros to deciding if you wanted to buy a fire pit.
Cons to Buying a Fire Pit
Here are the cons to buying a fire pit first.
First, many times they are cheaper in price but sometimes cheaper does mean not as good.
Number two, they are small for the amount of money that you need to pay for them.
Three, what you see is what you get.
Number four, more elaborate Fire pits in the store can run you some nice nice dough so just want to make sure you know that and check the price tag.
Five, using a propane tank (if that’s the route that you would go) sometimes can end up costing you more in the long run and since we are all about budget friendly, just wanted to bring that up.
Pros to Building a Fire Pit
If you’ve been watching us for a while, you’ll know that Andy and I will almost always pick building over buying if we have it within our skill sets because we enjoy the pros that building something can bring.
That’s why I wanted to give to you the pros of building your own DIY fire pit .
First is that you can customize the size.
Second, you can also customize the color of stone or material that you buy. I love that.
Option three. You can customize the design. Andy and I sometimes don’t agree on the design at first, but we always come up with something that both of us bring to the table and really love. So I love, that’s a pro for me.
Four, you can decide how high you want your fire pit to be. To me there’s a safety element involved, so I like to be able to decide how high that’s going to be.
For ideas of how to design your DIY fire pit, CLICK HERE
Fifth, is you can add whether you want to cook on it or not. To me that’s just something that if you’re buying a kit you have to maybe pay extra for that. So that’s a pro of if you’re going to build your fire pit,
Cons to Building a Fire Pit
I’d be lying to you if I said that there were not cons to building a fire pit. So I want to briefly tell you about this, but I also want to say that they weren’t nearly as big of obstacles as what I thought they were going to be.
The first one is there is more manual labor. It’s true.
The second one is you do have to prep your ground. I’ve talked to several people now who have built their own fire pits or even had a, which we’ll talk about later, a kit that they built them, you still have to prep your ground so there is that work involved as opposed to taking it out of the box, putting it on your deck and you’re done.
The third thing is you do need to decide on the type of material that you want to use, what kind of pavers, what color of paper. So there’s maybe a little bit more, mental labor that goes into making the decision because again, you get to customize this.
The fourth thing is that you do need to decide on design for us, I’ll show you pictures we chose to do instead of just laying it one way. We chose to do verticals as well as horizontal blocks. If I were to do it again, I probably would do one bit higher. But you know, you learn as you, and that was one of the cons.
Five is there is more work involved when you are going to assemble something. But when I say that we can, we did this in less than two hours other than going to the store and coming back. This is not a very hard project so I think that you can do this even with the cons involved. I think the pros outweigh them.
Comment below!
Would you do me a favor and comment below if you are ready for a fire pit right now to have fire, just comment below.
I am ready Sandy.
For Information about Courses that we teach
We know that as DIY enthusiast, that figuring out a project as you go is part of the game. BUT- if you want some help with tool lists and checklists for specific projects, go to our Ultimate Home Improvement Guide here, or CLICK HERE for the courses that we have for Concrete Countertops and Custom Acrylic Calendar.
Five Questions to ask before your build or buy your Fire Pit
I hope you’ve decided are you going to build or are you going to buy? I hope our pros and cons have allowed you to make that decision. So before you turn this video off, five things that I want you to think about.
Do you know your budget? We’re always keeping your budget in mind. We strongly suggest that you know your budget before you go out and buy your materials
Do you know what materials you are going to use? If you don’t know what kind of materials there are or the pros and cons to the different materials. We’re going to talk about that in a new video. So make sure that you subscribe below. You can catch that information.
Do you know the size of your fire pit?
Do you know the shape of your DIY Fire Pit? Don’t go shopping and do not buy materials until you know what size you’re going to go with. Go out and measure. Now, don’t let that up to, “Oh, I think I’ll just put it together.” Trust me, I have done projects like that before. You don’t want to do that with your fire pit.
Do you enjoy designing and building? If you chose yes within this process, then I hope that again, you’ll subscribe below because we are going to show you how we built ours, our fire pit in a day for less than $150 we definitely have some things that we did that we would never do again, but we have some things that we liked and we’d like to pass on to you, so stay tuned with us and make sure that you share this with somebody who you also know would enjoy a fire pit because we’d love to see what you were able to build.
We love helping you with DIY Home Improvement projects. CLICK HERE for ideas and inspiration.
Hope you have an awesome day!
Sandy
