We made the decision that we needed to make some adjustments to our backyard. The backyard is secluded so we enjoy spending time in it. We looked through many landscaping magazines, how ever we weren't able to find a landscaping idea that we wanted to add to our yard. The thought of having to keep up the maintenance with a water piece wasn't appealing. Not to mention mosquitoes and bugs are a plenty in our area, so a pond wasn't a great idea. We went to a home improvement store and started looking through the lawn and garden department. While we were browsing around I noticed that they had a section for outdoor fireplacesincluding a simple ring to create an outdoor fire pit. My husband and i knew that we had found the new addition for our backyard.

In past years we had done a lot of camping. Since moving into a rural neighborhood we no longer go camping. One of the things that both of us loved to do was to gaze at the campfire and just talk for hours. We agreed that an outdoor fire pit would re-create those old camping evenings in our own backyard. We are able to get a ton of firewood from the huge woods on the edge of our property, so we wouldn't need to spend any money on firewood.

Multiple options for designs were available at the hardware store to select from. There was an outdoor fire pit twhich offered the ability to bbq with the grill on top. Just recently we had bought a bbq gas grill so the fire pit frill option wasn't a need for us. We just wanted to keep it simple. We bought a big fire ring as well as fireproof bricks. our backyard area has a small depression close to the wooded area. We figured this would be a wonderful place to have our outdoor fire pit. The firebricks were positioned in a sqaure shape around the lowered area. Then the fire ring was sat on top of the bircks. By placing the ring on the bricks we were protecting from grass fires and also makes the outdoor fire pit easy to mow around. We also gota couple of park benches to put on either side of the fire ring.

We spend a lot of our evenings circled around our outdoor fire pit. The interesting thing is that we assumed the area would provide us a spot to to spending evenings talking. Now don't get me wrong there is lots of talkingthat happens around the fire pit, the majority of it takes place with our neighbors. There is something about the smell of a wood fire which brings neighbors out of their yards and into oursto relax around the fire pit. We are still glad that we decided to purchase the outdoor fire pit it's allowed us to get to know our neighbors much better then if we hadn't.