We are still in the “house tweaking” phase of the new house, awaiting construction to begin on the new peaked roof. It is delayed for several reasons, but mostly because FEMA is bananas. It is the federal government, so not very surprising. Architectural plans are being redrawn and new trusses designed, and I am sincerely hoping construction begins in a few weeks. Until then, we shall focus on the exterior.

This funny shaped area (picture a wonky egg with corners) between the house and the pool had bushes in it, and as you can see, two sprinkler heads. The bushes obstructed the view from the pool of the TV we bring outside on weekends. An awful problem to have, I know. I took the bushes out one afternoon, and we had the epic idea to turn this area into a fire pit. A FIRE PIT! (<— this is not doing justice to my enthusiasm!)

First, we had to cap off these sprinklers, which was pretty simple.  We dug around to uncover the source pipe, cut it off, and capped it.

The nail polish remover was used to clean the pipe before applying the glue (which is actually a chemical solvent that melts the two plastics together). Be sure to use nail polish remover containing acetone.

Boom!  Fire pit building time!

We decided to recess it into the ground a little bit so we didn’t end up removing TV-obstructing bushes and replacing them with a TV-obstructing fire pit. That’s when it happened.

There are two problems in this picture.  First, we discovered ANOTHER pipe, that we didn’t know about, which feeds the circulatory system of the pool (I’m sure that is not the correct term, but I don’t know what the correct term is, and this is why we pay a pool guy). Our brainstorming ideas included (1) off setting the fire pit to one side to avoid contact with the pipe (hideous!); (2) putting down a thermal barrier of some sort (eh); or (3) giving up (nope!). Finally, the Boy had a great idea. Pavers!

The second problem with the picture above is that the stones we bought have these raised lips on them (right side of the picture), so no matter how we stacked them, they didn’t sit flat. We later learned that this is because they are actually made for retaining walls, to be stacked with the lip down catching the back edge of the stone below it, and therefore able to withstand the pressure of earth pushing against it. We remedied this issue by getting a chisel, hammer, and whacking the lip off of every single stone. It was a bit time consuming, but fairly easy, and worked great.

We left a few inches of dirt on top of the pipe, put the pavers down, which helped making leveling easier, as well as providing a barrier, and then built the fire pit on top of it. It is important to note that this was the FOURTH time we laid out the stones, and these suckers are heavy. We placed them once before discovering the pipe, once off to the side in a strange shape, and twice in the location you see now. It was exhausting, but we are loving the fire pit just in time for the weather to get chilly (60ish degrees at night = chilly for a Floridian).

With the addition of rocks around the pit, as well as in it for a little extra distance between the fire and the pipe, we called it a day. Well, a night.

I have no idea whose toe that is.