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In the courtyard of the house, in the summer cottage or garden, it is so nice to sit by the fire, fry kebabs. There are metal grills for frying meat, but they are utilitarian and it never occurs to anyone to enjoy the view of burning firewood. On the contrary, ready-made coals are often thrown, adding only a little thin firewood to keep preparation time to a minimum. In the case of a bonfire – a special place for making a fire – everything is different. This place is often referred to as a fire pit. It is conceived in order not only to fry shish kebabs, but also to admire the fire. In the dacha and garden plot, the hearth for the fire will come in handy even after pruning: it will be possible to burn the branches, and use the ashes as fertilizer.
Place for a fire in the country
It is better to place a hearth for a fire in a personal plot or in a country house at a sufficient distance from the house so that the smoke does not reach the house.
The site should be blown by the winds – good traction is needed for normal combustion. The place should be flat or some area will have to be leveled – under the hearth itself and under a place to rest, benches, benches or chairs.
Device and dimensions
The hearth for a fire can be round or rectangular in shape. It can be buried so much that it will be on the same level with the ground, it can be partially buried, with slightly elevated walls. There are options that are generally above ground level – they are placed on a previously prepared site. So the choice is yours.
It is useless to argue about forms. Round ones are more convenient – we stack firewood with a hut. But rectangular ones are easier to build, especially brick ones. Here all the tricks are known – the masonry is carried out like an ordinary wall. Just a wall thickness – a quarter of a brick.
Those who decide how to equip a fire pit in the backyard of the house, in the country or in the garden, usually have several questions:
- How big should a fire pit be?
- Do I need a blower, if so, how much, what size, how to make them and where to place them?
- To install a grate or not?
- How to make it easier to clean the hearth?
In fact, the first two questions are related. If the dimensions of the fire bowl are quite overall – a meter or more in diameter, you can make the walls solid, without blowing. If less than a meter, you will have to make holes for air to enter.
Blowing is better done not from below, but in the walls. Their number – two or four – diagonally opposite each other. Small holes are left in the wall, breaking off a piece of brick (a quarter, approximately). If necessary, they can be laid with the same, slightly hewn, quarters. It’s not worth making a blower from below: with such a design, ash flakes often fly around the site during the “work” of the hearth – they are carried away by an air stream, which is difficult to regulate with such a design.
About the grates. This is how you feel more comfortable – you can do it, but they do not really affect functionality or convenience.
site preparation
If the site has dense sandy soils, earthworks can be excluded. The second version of the simplified device of the fire pit is the existing site, lined with paving slabs, stone, asphalted or concreted. On this base, you can lay a couple of rows of bricks or stone. Here is the finished hearth. This option is ideal for soils with poor water drainage. After rain, on such a site, a recessed bowl for a fire will turn into a mini-pond and will dry for a very long time.
In other cases, preparatory work is indispensable. No, you can lay down a hearth for a fire right on the ground, but after a few years it will become unusable – the walls will “creep” after rains or spring heaving of the soil. Preparing a site for a fire pit is standard:
- We remove the fertile layer of soil, remove the roots, stones.
- We level and ram the soil.
- We pour a layer of crushed stone (not lime, but granite) of medium and large fractions 10-20 cm in size, level, ram.
Already on this base, you can install a hearth, provided that you are satisfied with a crushed stone pillow as a base or are going to pour concrete. True, for concrete, it will be necessary to assemble formwork around the perimeter. If you plan to pave the area around the hearth with tiles or stone, pour sand or a fine screening fraction on the rubble. Sand / screenings are rammed, leveled, then tile or stone is laid.
On clay or fertile soils, so that the crushed stone does not “leave” into the ground, geotextiles with a density of 200-250 g / m are placed under it. This is a non-woven material that allows water to pass through, prevents roots from germinating and prevents the crushed stone from mixing with the soil. In fact, this is a very important layer that is best laid down.
How to make a concrete fire pit
A concrete fire pit can be round or square. The only difference is in the shape of the formwork. You only need two rings or two rectangles/squares.
A round shape can be made, for example, from two metal barrels of different diameters. It will only be necessary to cut off two rings of the desired height. After the concrete has hardened, the form will need to be removed, so it will have to be cut. If you may need it in the future, make a detachable form of two half rings. On one side, weld the hinges, on the other, make locks-clamps.
The square shape is easiest to make from boards, fiberboard scraps, thick plywood. They don’t have to be new, but they should be even. We use self-tapping screws to assemble the form – it will also need to be disassembled.
The distance between the outer and inner formwork must be equal to the wall thickness. For a concrete hearth, a sufficient thickness is 15-20 cm. We put the form on the prepared base, check the distance, verticality and horizontality. We fix the form by driving in pegs so that the formwork does not move when filled with concrete.
A ring formed between the two formworks, into which we will pour concrete. We stick into this ring into the ground and hammer in pieces of reinforcement with a diameter of 10-14 mm. They are needed for greater rigidity of the walls. The length of the reinforcement is about 60 cm, the installation step is 15-20 cm. We also hammer into the ground by 15-20 cm. We place the reinforcement in the middle of the ring and so that its upper edge “sinks” in concrete by 5 cm or a little more.
Now you can pour concrete. The composition is normal; for 1 part of M150 cement, 3 parts of sand and 4 parts of crushed stone. Water is usually obtained in 0,7-0,8 parts (depending on the moisture content of sand and gravel). Concrete is poured into the form, left for 5-7 days, after which the formwork is disassembled. A concrete hearth for a fire is ready, only a fire can be made in it no earlier than in 2-3 weeks, and better – in a month and a half. Only then will it gain enough strength and not crack from the fire.
Making a fire pit out of brick or stone
There are many ways to equip a fire pit with bricks. There are simple and cheap, but which can quickly fall apart. There are more difficult to manufacture, but they will serve for several years for sure. To build a hearth for a fire, you can use ordinary solid red brick, but it will not “live” for long. Such material can be used for country or garden hearths for one or two seasons.
According to the rules
For permanently designed recreation areas, it will be necessary to look for fireclay bricks. You can already choose the sizes yourself, but it’s easier to put from smaller ones, even if it takes longer. But even for the largest fire pit, only four or five dozen bricks are needed, so the masonry will not take so long.
Fireclay bricks are not cheap pleasure, so when laying the hearth, usually the inside of the hearth is laid out of fireclay, which is in direct contact with the flame. The outer part can be lined with ordinary brick or stone.
If you have already gone broke on fireclay bricks, then laying it on fireclay mortar is worth it – it is sold as a powder in bags. Water is added to the composition, stirred. After a while, the solution is ready for use. After folding the hearth, you will have to wait 5-7 days for the solution to dry out. Then you load the hearth with firewood to the fullest and warm it up for a couple of hours. This is necessary so that the mortar and brick are sintered into a single whole, and for this the temperature must be high. So do not spare firewood here. But fireclay mortar is used only for laying the inside of the hearth – where the temperatures are the highest. The outer row is placed on a cement-sand mortar. Fireclay is unacceptable here – it will not have enough temperature and it will simply crumble.
Ordinary brick can be laid on clay or cement mortar. In some cases, you can do without mortar at all – by filling the voids between the bricks with compacted rubble, sand or soil.
Simple and fast
You can set up a campfire site in just a few hours. It will take only a few flat granite stones or pebbles, crushed stone. They spread the bottom of the fire. You can also lay a brick on the bottom, and fill the gaps with rubble. To build the walls of the hearth for a fire, you need a dozen two or three bricks. That’s all.
The order of work on the arrangement of the fire is as follows:
- We mark a circle on the ground.
- We remove the sod and remove the soil to a depth that is equal to the length of the brick and the thickness of the base. The brick installed on the poke should rise at least a little above the ground level – then the hearth will not flood or blow out.
- Level and seal the bottom.
- We lay out bricks or stones, tap them well with a mallet (or just with our feet).
- We fill the gaps with crushed stone, which is also well pressed into the ground.
- On a circle we expose “sticking out” bricks. They become close to one another on one side, and small gaps form on the other side. They are filled with previously excavated soil (if it is not clay or loam), sand or fine gravel.
That’s all. A simple brick hearth for a fire is ready. It is not a fact that after a good rain it will remain in its normal form, but it requires a little time and money.
Reliable design of a round hearth for a fire made of bricks
In order for a brick fire to serve for a long time, its walls must stand on a solid foundation. On a crushed stone pillow, a reinforced concrete belt is usually poured. It is made in a circle, the thickness is not less than the thickness of the walls, the height is 10-15 cm. For greater strength, a reinforcing ring made of a bar with a diameter of 12-14 mm is placed approximately in the middle of the height.
The inner part of the hearth is lined with fireclay bricks, the outer part is ordinary, hollow, laid with bandaging of the seams (with an offset of half a brick). Fireclay bricks are placed on clay or fireclay mortar, ordinary bricks are placed on a cement-sand mixture.
Such a hearth for a fire made of bricks requires more materials and time for arrangement, but it will serve for more than one year. And so that it is not flooded with precipitation and does not fill up with foliage, you can cover the fire with a shield. In this form, by the way, it can be used as a table.
Exactly according to the same principle, a square or rectangular brick hearth is built. Technology is unchanged, the difference is only in form.
Simple options
You can make a hearth for a fire much faster. Firstly, a lot of country or courtyard hearths made of metal are offered. All you need is a platform on which you put a metal fire pit.
The advantage of this solution is not too high a price and the simplicity of arranging a campfire site. The advantages include low weight, which allows you to bring the installation under the roof for the winter or in bad weather.
A very similar option is a concrete fire pit. They are cast in different sizes, they are round or square. You can do exactly the same yourself, but you will have to wait at least a month. And they put the finished bowl, and you can use it.
Photo ideas for decorating a campfire site
Making a fire pit is only half the battle. It is also necessary to equip the site – so that you can sit, look at the fire, enjoy the evening and chat with friends. We have collected some interesting ideas in this section.