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How to make a bonfire in the country, in the yard

In the courtyard of a house, in a summer cottage or garden plot, it is so nice to sit by the fire, fry barbecue. For frying meat, eat metal barbecues, but they are utilitarian and it never occurs to anyone to enjoy the sight of burning firewood. On the contrary, they often throw in ready-made coals, adding only a little thin firewood to keep preparation time to a minimum. In the case of a bonfire - a special place to make a fire - it's different. This place is more commonly referred to as a fire pit. It is conceived in order not only to fry kebabs, but also to admire the fire. In the summer cottage and garden area, the fireplace will also come in handy after pruning: you can burn the branches, and use the ash as fertilizer.

The content of the article

1 Campfire site in the country
2 Device and dimensions
3 Site preparation
4 How to make a concrete fire pit
5 Making a fireplace out of brick or stone
6 Simple options
7 Photo ideas for decorating a campfire site

Campfire site in the country

It is better to place a fireplace in a personal plot or in a country house at a sufficient distance from the house so that the smoke does not reach the house.

If you equip a campfire site with a bonfire and put a couple of benches, you get a very cozy place

The site must be blown by the winds - good traction is needed for normal combustion. The place must be flat or you will have to level some area - under the hearth itself and under a place for rest, benches, benches or armchairs.

Device and dimensions

The fire pit can be round or rectangular. It can be buried so deep that it is level with the ground, it can be partially buried, with slightly raised walls. There are options that are generally above the ground level - they are placed on a previously prepared site. So the choice is yours.

The fireplace can be completely or partially recessed.

It is useless to argue about the forms. Round ones are more convenient - we put the firewood in a hut. But rectangular ones are easier to build, especially brick ones. Here all the techniques are known - the masonry is carried out as a regular wall. It's just that the wall thickness is a quarter of a brick.

Those who decide how to equip a fireplace in the backyard of a house, in a country house or in a garden area usually have several questions:

What size should a fire pit be?
Do I need a blower, if so, how many, what sizes, how to make them and where to place them?
To put the grate or not?
How can you make cleaning the hearth easier?

In fact, the first two questions are related. If the dimensions of the fire bowl are quite overall - a meter or more in diameter, the walls can be made solid, without a blower. If less than a meter, you will have to make holes for air intake.

Outdoor type of fireplace

It is better to do the blower not from below, but in the walls. Their number - two or four - diagonally opposite each other. Small holes are left in the wall, breaking off a piece of brick (about a quarter). If necessary, they can be laid with the same, slightly hewn, quarters. It is not worth making a blower from below: with such a design, ash flakes often fly around the site during the "work" of the hearth - they are carried away by the air flow, which with such a design is difficult to regulate.

About the grates. It is as convenient for you - you can do it, but they do not particularly affect functionality or convenience.

Site preparation

If the site has dense sandy soils, earthwork can be excluded. The second variant of the simplified arrangement of the fire pit is the existing site, lined with paving slabs, stone, asphalt or concreted. On this base, you can lay a couple of rows of brick or stone.So the hearth is ready. This option is ideal for soils that do not drain water well. After rain, in such an area, the buried bowl under the fire will turn into a mini-pond and will dry for a very long time.

You can prepare the site like this ... By the way, an interesting idea is to use concrete blocks, loading the voids with pebbles or rubble

In other cases, preparatory work is indispensable. No, you can lay down the hearth for a fire right on the ground, but after a few years it will become unusable - the walls will "creep" after rains or spring heaving of the soil. Preparing a site for a fire pit is standard:

We remove the fertile soil layer, remove the roots, stones.
We level and tamp the soil.
We fill in a layer of crushed stone (not lime, but granite) of medium and coarse fraction with dimensions of 10-20 cm, level it, ram.

Already on this base, you can install a hearth, provided that you are satisfied with a crushed stone pillow as a base or are going to pour concrete. True, for concrete you will need to assemble the formwork around the perimeter. If you plan to pave the area around the hearth with tiles or stone, pour sand or a fine fraction of screenings onto the rubble. Sand / screening is rammed, leveled, then tiles or stone are laid.

Rubble is not so bad

On clay or fertile soils, so that the crushed stone does not "go" into the ground, they put geotextile with a density of 200-250 g / m2. This is a non-woven material that allows water to pass through, prevents roots from germinating and prevents rubble from mixing with the soil. In fact, this is a very important layer to be applied.

How to make a concrete fire pit

A concrete fireplace can be round or square. The only difference is in the form of the formwork. You only need two rings or two rectangles / squares.

A round shape can be made, for example, from two metal barrels of different diameters. You just need to cut off two rings of the desired height. After the concrete has set, the mold will have to be removed, so it will have to be cut. If you may need it in the future, make a split form from two half rings. On the one hand, weld the hinges, on the other, make the locks.

The formwork elements are fixed relative to each other, the formwork is fixed to the ground and filled with concrete

The easiest way to make a square shape is from boards, scraps of fiberboard, thick plywood. They don't have to be new, but they should be even. We use self-tapping screws to assemble the mold - it will also need to be disassembled.

The distance between the outer and inner formwork must be equal to the wall thickness. For a concrete hearth, the thickness is sufficient - 15-20 cm. We put the form on the prepared base, check the distance, verticality and horizontalness. We fix the form by driving in pegs so that the formwork does not move when filling with concrete.

A ring has formed between the two formwork, into which we will pour concrete. We stick and hammer pieces of reinforcement with a diameter of 10-14 mm into this ring into the ground. They are needed for greater rigidity of the walls. The length of the reinforcement is about 60 cm, the installation step is 15-20 cm. We also drive the reinforcement into the ground by 15-20 cm. We place the reinforcement in the middle of the ring and so that its upper edge "sinks" in the concrete by 5 cm or a little more.

Pour, level and leave for a week

The concrete can now be poured. The composition is usual; for 1 part of cement M150, 3 parts of sand and 4 parts of crushed stone. Water is usually obtained 0.7-0.8 parts (depending on the moisture content of sand and gravel). Pour the concrete into a mold, leave it for 5-7 days, after which the formwork is disassembled. The concrete hearth for the fire is ready, but the fire can be made in it not earlier than in 2-3 weeks, and better - in a month and a half. Only then will it gain enough strength and not crack from fire.

Making a fireplace out of brick or stone

You can equip a campfire site with bricks in different ways. There are simple and cheap ones, but which can quickly fall apart. There are more complex ones to manufacture, but they will serve for several years for sure.For the construction of a hearth for a fire, you can use an ordinary solid red brick, but it will not "live" for long. Such material can be used for country or garden hearths for one or two seasons.

If you need to do it quickly, you can.

According to the rules

For permanently decorated recreation areas, you will need to look for fireclay bricks. You will already choose the sizes yourself, but it is easier to lay out the smaller ones, even though it takes longer. But even for the largest campfire, only four to five dozen bricks are needed, so laying will not take so much time.

Fireclay brick is not a cheap pleasure, so when laying a hearth, usually the inside of the hearth is laid out of fireclay, which is in direct contact with the flame. The outer part can be lined with ordinary brick or stone.

One example of a small fire in the country

If you are already broke on fireclay bricks, then put it on fireclay mortar - it is sold in powder form in bags. Water is added to the composition, stirred. After a while, the solution is ready for use. After you fold the hearth, you will have to wait 5-7 days for the solution to dry out. Then you load the hearth with firewood in full and warm it up for a couple of hours. This is necessary so that the mortar and brick are sintered into a single whole, and for this the temperature must be high. So do not feel sorry for firewood here. But fireclay solution is used only for laying the inner part of the hearth - where the temperatures are highest. The outer row is placed on a cement-sand mortar. Fireclay is unacceptable here - it will not have enough temperature and it will simply crumble.

Ordinary bricks can be laid on a clay or cement mortar. In some cases, you can do without mortar at all - by filling the voids between the bricks with compacted rubble, sand or soil.

Simple and fast

It takes just a few hours to set up a campfire site. You only need a few flat granite stones or pebbles, rubble. They spread the bottom of the fire pit. You can also lay a brick on the bottom, and fill the gaps with rubble. To erect the walls of the hearth for a fire, you will need two or three dozen bricks. That's all.

Such a hearth for a fire can be made of brick in a few hours

The procedure for arranging a fireplace is as follows:

We mark a circle on the ground.
We remove the sod and remove the soil to a depth that is equal to the length of the brick and the thickness of the base. The brick installed on the poke should rise at least a little above the ground level - then the hearth will not flood or blow out.
We align and compact the bottom.
We lay out bricks or stones, tap them well with a mallet (or just with our feet).
We fill the gaps with rubble, which we also press well into the ground.
We put "sticking" bricks around the circumference. They stand on one side close to one another, and on the other side small gaps are formed. They are filled with previously excavated soil (if it is not clay or loam), sand or fine gravel.

Option with laying a row of bricks around the perimeter

That's all, actually. A simple brick fire pit is ready. It is not a fact that after a good rain, it will remain in its normal form, but it requires little time and money.

Reliable construction of a round brick fire pit

In order for a brick fireplace to serve for a long time, its walls must stand on a solid foundation. On a crushed stone pillow, a reinforced concrete belt is usually poured. It is made in a circle, the thickness is not less than the wall thickness, the height is 10-15 cm. For greater strength, a reinforcing ring made of a rod with a diameter of 12-14 mm is placed approximately in the middle of the height.

Arrangement of a round brick fire pit

The inner part of the hearth is lined with fireclay bricks, the outer part is ordinary, hollow, laid with bandaging of the seams (with an offset of half a brick). Fireclay brick is placed on clay or fireclay mortar, ordinary brick - on a cement-sand mixture.

Such a brick fire pit requires more materials and time to set up, but it will last for more than one year. And so that it is not flooded with precipitation and foliage, you can cover the fire pit with a shield. In this form, by the way, it can be used as a table.

A simpler option

In exactly the same way, a square or rectangular brick hearth is built. Technologists are unchanged, the only difference is in the form.

Simple options

You can make a hearth for a fire much faster. Firstly, a lot of country or courtyard metal hearths are offered. All you need is a platform where you will put up a metal fire pit.

A metal bowl is a quick way to decorate a campfire site

The advantage of this solution is not too high a price and simplicity of setting up a place for making a fire. The advantages include low weight, which allows you to bring the installation under the roof for the winter or in bad weather.

A very similar option is a concrete fire bowl. They are cast in different sizes, they are round or square. You can do exactly the same yourself, but you will have to wait at least a month. And you put the finished bowl, and you can use it.

Fast and hassle-free

Photo ideas for decorating a campfire site

Making a fire pit is only half the battle. We also need to equip the site - so that you can sit, look at the fire, enjoy the evening and chat with friends. We have collected some interesting ideas in this section.