A couple of weeks ago, we decided to add a fire pit to the backyard. All that woody debris (hey, remember him?!) continues to pile up, and the portable little metal pit we were using was ineffective.
Wanting to prove my homesteading skills, I told Tara I would tackle this project myself. Surely, building a fire pit from scratch couldn’t be too complicated! I did some research, found an HGTV article on how to build a fire pit for less than $100, and was ready to go. Tara and I took a trip to Menards on Saturday to buy the materials, and Sunday morning, I let the world know the project was on.
Our very own Autumn Ashbough offered up some encouraging words.
Autumn should know that, regardless of the outcome, there’s going to be an entertaining blog post about the project!
(Spoiler alert: you’re reading it now.)
“Not the handiest guy in the world” is an understatement. I inherited several things from my dad: a sense of adventure, a love of the great outdoors, and a complete lack of mechanical ability. I am not the type to build things, as I lack the DIY gene, so I had a bit of trepidation entering into this project.
Fortunately, it went pretty smoothly…for the most part. There is now a fire pit where, a few hours earlier, there hadn’t been one. That’s a win.
The HGTV article promised the whole thing could be completed in about an hour. It took me closer to five, but that included a side project transplanting a bunch of the sod, plus two additional trips to Menards for materials, because the instructions indicated you’d need 12 retaining wall blocks for each layer, when in reality, 13 were required. And then I decided to add a fourth layer to make it higher.
Not bad, if I do say so myself! I’m going to remove some more grass around the base and add river rock, but otherwise, it’s good to go. The worst (and most time-consuming) part of the project was leveling the bottom layer. As I have stated, I’m no builder, so I didn’t even know I had to make the structure level. I mean, I figured I’d eyeball it so it was relatively straight, but my wife, who is far more experienced in these matters, impressed upon me the importance of using an actual level. This turned out to be a very painstaking process, and it didn’t help that I was sweating profusely, mosquitoes were dive-bombing me constantly, and my knees were rubbed raw from the grass, but eventually I got ‘er done.
Can’t wait for cool fall evenings and long marshmallow-impaled sticks.
I’ve mentioned all the thunderstorms we’ve been having this year, right? We haven’t gone more than a few days without ’em in months – and when it does rain, we get torrential downpours. Our rainfall is way above average for the year.
This didn’t stop us from driving to Warner Park in Madison on Friday for Make Music Madison, a city-wide (and global) music festival that takes place each year on June 21, the approximate summer solstice. Justin the Realtor sponsors performances at the Rainbow Pavilion, and as a bonus, his sister/my blogging friend Jess was there this year, and her husband Joe’s band TUGG was playing. We had to go!
Was the weather great? Far from it. I drove through thunderstorms with heavy rain to get there, but we had a great time nonetheless. It was nice to catch up with Jess, whom we hadn’t seen since August 2022.
Afterward, we stopped for a late sushi dinner on Willy Street before heading home. The clouds parted and the full strawberry moon hung low and bright in the sky, which – along with hundreds of fireflies lighting up the night – made for a rather magical drive back home.
We had more wild weather Saturday, including a deluge of epic proportions that evening, but we were pretty fortunate to avoid the sirens this time. Five tornadoes tore through southern Wisconsin, including an EF-2 in Janesville, smaller ones in Watertown and Delavan – all towns pretty close to us – and another one in Argyle that destroyed a historic church. Geez Louise! This is getting insane.
And guess what we can look forward to tonight?
If there’s one consolation, the corn is growing like gangbusters. Knee-high by the 4th of July? Pssh. It’s already waist-high in places.
Mark My Words 
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