Fire pits, gas fire tables and seat walls

A wood-burning fire pit gets a steel insert ring with a block or stone surround built around it. The ring takes the heat so the block face does not cook, spall and start dropping its corners. The pit sits on the same base as the paver patio around it: 3/4" clean crushed base, 8" to 16" deep depending on the soil and the application, compacted in lifts. It is set into the field, not dropped on top of it, so nothing rocks and nothing settles away from the pavers. Surround height gets set so a seated person sees fire and not wall.

A gas fire table needs a level pad and a line under it, and that line has to be sleeved and run before the pavers go down. Running it afterward means cutting the finished field back open. We do the excavation, the sleeve and the pad. The gas connection itself is made by a licensed plumber or gas fitter. We do not do gas work and we do not price it as ours. Gas gets used more on a weeknight than wood does, because it is on in a minute, off in a minute, and nothing gets hauled out in the morning.

A fire pit wants to sit off the house, off the fence, and out from under eaves, low branches and anything with a vinyl face that warps. For a gas unit the minimum clearance comes out of the appliance instructions, and for an open wood fire it comes from the local rules, so we lay it out on the ground on site instead of quoting a number off a page. Wind matters as much. The evening wind runs down the valley, and it is worse on open lots toward Belgrade and Four Corners than behind a hedge in older Bozeman.

A seat wall gets a mortared core and a flat cap wide enough to actually sit on, not a lip that catches your leg. Caps are laid with a slight fall so water runs off the face instead of standing in the joint and freezing it apart. Height gets set to chair height, and the wall doubles as the thing that breaks the wind on the open side of the fire. A seat wall sits as well on a flagstone patio as on pavers. Otherwise we set boulders: flat-topped, buried about a third, weathered face out.

In the overhead photo on this page the patio is two fields, not one. The square paver patio holds the furniture. The fire pit court is its own circle of pavers with the pit inset in the middle, and bands of gravel run between the two. Splitting it that way lets the circle get cut cleanly instead of dying into a square field, gives the chair scuffing and the stray ember somewhere to land, and lets the pit court sit at its own level. Every curve in it came off a wet saw.

A fire pit is patio work. A full outdoor fireplace is masonry: a poured footing below the 36 inch frost depth Bozeman builds to, a block core, a firebox and flue sized to draw instead of smoking back at you, and a cap and chimney detailed to shed water. It runs in weeks rather than days, with cure time built into the schedule. That work is on our masonry page. A pit puts people in a circle and a fireplace puts them in a row facing it.