From Fire Pit Hell to Wishing Well

As our first summer on the property approached, we found ourselves longing for even more outdoor "living" space. When we were residing in suburbia, we often enjoyed neighborhood bonfires in the middle of the street; so we started brainstorming for a wide open-space alternative. We shopped around for the little run-of-the-mill fire pits, but even the bulkiest offerings at our local home improvement stores would seem dwarfed in our landscape. Not to mention that the bigger the fire-pit, the more inflated the price. Once again, we resorted to doing what we do best - improvising.

We foraged some more big rocks and bought a few bags of mortar - if the whole thing went terribly wrong, we would only be out $20 and some sweat equity...it was worth a shot. 

We had such a great experience with the pea gravel that we used for the pond, we decided to use another scoop for our "seating area" around the pit itself. We weren't worried about our beautiful brown dirt catching fire, we just wanted to define the space a little more. The gravel ran another $50, but we were confident that even if we ended up scrapping the whole project, we could definitely find another use for it.

One of the things that I have learned about my husband in my 18 years with him, is that he doesn't do anything half-way. He takes the Tim Taylor approach to anything he does - more power, bigger, louder... combine his love of the excess and his love of fire, and I should not have been surprised at the behemoth creation that resulted.

I mentioned before that some of our projects are successes, and others are "lessons" learned in what not to do. I adored the fire pit, and our friends and family had many night of enjoyment sitting around its warmth. That being said, here is where we went wrong: A fire pit of that size requires a significant sized fire to be made in it. A few logs didn't even get the flames over the top of the rocks. So to fuel such a huge fire, the flames were burning at such intensity that we required at least 3 foot wooden dowels to roast marshmallows, lest we melted our faces off. Not to mention that the flames spit embers several feet in the air. While the rocks obviously didn't catch fire - the wooden chairs, my favorite jacket, and my hair - all suffered damage from the small portal to Hell that we had created.

In addition to what we found to be obvious safety hazards (and the concern that someone in the distance might report a wild fire), the rocks themselves just couldn't withstand the intense heat. By the end of summer, we began to notice significant cracks and crumbling in most of them.

We were faced with a dilemma, Mike wanted to knock the whole thing down with the John Deere, but what the fire pit lacked in functionality, I felt it made up for in appearance. Quite simply, I loved the look of the stone, and was agonized at the thought of all those hours of loading and unloading boulders, of stacking and mortaring, to be demolished in a matter of seconds.

I have admittedly always been one to look for the whimsy and magic in life. My girls and I love fairy tails and Harry Potter, pixies and dreams come true. The more I looked at our "failure", the less I saw an unusable fire pit, and the more I saw the beginning of a wishing well. What could bring more magic and whimsy to a still very barren yard than our very own wishing well? As if the fates themselves were speaking to me, within a week of hatching my brilliant idea, we happened to drive past a trailer on the side of the road. A trailer full of broken up decking and other miscellaneous pieces of wood, fatefully adorned with a "FREE" sign. 

With a huge pile of free scrap wood, and a husband with apparently unlimited patience for my hair brained ideas, we set out to transform our danger zone into a wishing well. We had no electricity run to this area of the yard for a pump, and I had no patience to attempt to properly seal the stones and mortar, so my husband filled it with dirt, and I filled it with plants! While I would still love to have it functional as a water feature at some point in the not too distant feature, I love the look that it gives as a raised planting area as well.