DIY Fire Pit and Seating Area (2024)

Eight years ago, my wife and I bought this house, due in part to the very large backyard - roughly .5 acre. For eight years we had never done anything meaningful with it. Until now. I'd like to add that I did this project entirely by myself and that before we began this project, I had absolutely zero experience with construction, landscaping, or home improvement projects. So with that in mind, I fully admit I probably made several mistakes that may be glaring to some.

With that being said, please see our brand new fire pit and seating area:

For this fire pit I used the RumbleStone pavers from Home Depot. I decided to make it 4 courses high. For each course I used 12 Traps and 12 Minis for a total of 48 trapezoid blocks and 48 mini blocks.

In addition to the stones, I also purchased landscape adhesive to lock the stone layers together, a caulk gun, marking paint, and gravel and sand for drainage inside the pit.

Again, I'm not a construction-minded individual, so I did the best I could here. I staked a post in the center of the fire pit ring. Then I unrolled some garden twine and attached one end to the stake. I ran the string out to 12 feet* and attached the other end to an eye bolt** I had lying around. I then pulled the twine taut and took a spray can of marking paint and sprayed as I walked with the twine held as close to the ground as possible.

*There was no rhyme or reason to the 12 feet figure. Truth be told, the small tape measure I was using only went to 12 feet, so that's where I stopped. As it turned out I think the 24 foot diameter was a perfect size.

**An eye bolt was totally not necessary. This could have easily been a pencil, a stick, another person...really could've been nothing at all probably.

I wasn't really sure about this part, but I knew I needed some way for the pit to drain after rain.

So I ended up digging around a foot and a half deep. It doesn't have to be perfect by any means, but I made sure the sides were fairly straight.

Now that the sand is level and packed, lay the first course of stones,alternating trap, min,trap, mini, etc. and checking for level often.

This was the most time-consuming part yet. It wasn't hard to get the stones set necessarily, but ensuring that each stone was level was much more difficult and aggravating than I could've expected.

After the stones were finally set and level, I added one more bag of sand over the course of stones, then using a shop broom pushed the sand in between the stones. I'm honestly not really sure if this part was needed, but it seemed like a good idea, and I had one bag left, so in it went. Also, it's really important to brush the stones with the broom to ensure that there's no sand on them for the next step.

This was the easiest part of the entire process I'd say.

It's also the most fun, since this is when you start seeing all the hard work taking shape.

To get started on this step, apply a bead of landscape adhesive in a zigzag form where you plan to lay the next stone of the next course. Make sure to stagger the stones over the previous layer (you can see what I mean in the photo for this step). In the second layer (first layer of this step), I intentionally left a gap between two of the blocks to allow for oxygen flow. Keep going until you're done with all four courses of stone, and Boom! Fire pit!

Outline the seating area with the landscape edging, leaving an opening for your walkway. I didn't bother to paint the boundaries for the walkway area, I just bought extra landscape edging and used a 4 foot 2x4 to space the edging out along the walkway and formed it to the curved shape that my better half requested.

Once everything is outlined with edging, spray the area with weed/grass killer. I waited about 24 hours until it was all dry and then rolled out and staked down the landscape fabric.

Note: You'll notice in the photos that I didn't have the walkway in when I started laying the fabric. It would've been better to get it all done at the same time,but I ran out of edging, so I decided to finish what I could before going back to Lowe's.

We went with crushed limestone. It's a little more expensive than pea gravel, but I think it looks better.

We got 7.5 tons and it was $535 delivered.

Note: You see the pathway there with the weed/grass killer in full effect. I put down landscape fabric along the pathway right after this photo was taken.