Last fall, I decided I wanted an outdoor fire pit to help burn up the yard waste and give us a place to gather in the evenings and rest. I pinned pictures of fire pits.
I scanned craigslist for building materials, studied the yard to find the best spot, and researched how to make a level seating area. To do it right was a little more work than I could invest and required me doing some other projects first, like cleaning up the storage area under the deck, jack-hammering out some excess concrete, digging out some established bushes, hauling in gravel and redoing part of the deck supports. So the season came and went and we still didn’t have a fire pit.
Then this weekend, I looked at our yard and all the fallen sticks from the spring storms and the passion for a DIY fire pit hit me again. What if it wasn’t perfect? What if it wasn’t in the right spot? What if it didn’t have a pebble sitting area? We’d still have fires. We could still make s’mores and sing songs and be together.
So last Saturday, after our 4th soccer game and a wedding shower, we went to Aldi and bought marshmallows, chocolate bars and hot dogs. Then we went to Menards and bought 30 of these stones.
It took me 15 minutes to unload the stones from the car and stack them into a fire ring. We chose a spot at the corner of our driveway where we have been splitting wood for the last 3 years. It has a nice base of wood chips that really should be cleaned up, but we sat our lawn chairs on it instead. The beauty of this is the stones can be moved at any time. There’s no mortar or concrete involved. It doesn’t matter that nothing about the project was “right” because it can be as permanent or as temporary as we want it to be.
It didn’t even matter that we made our fire wrong. We eventually got it to light, though the wind made that a challenge.
The s’mores on our imperfect fire tasted just as good.
This one was made from an orange marshmallow from Aldi’s Easter line. It tasted just like a wack an orange.
The kids rode their bikes on the driveway, played a game of basketball, and jumped on the trampoline. It was so much fun that we did it again the next night.
It made me stop and think. What if I didn’t worry about perfect and just did more things?