L-06.OL · Outdoor Living & Fire Features
Stone fire features, fireplaces, water features and pergolas — the reason the family actually goes out there instead of looking at it through the window.
Every other trade on this list makes a property correct. This is the one that makes it used. A terrace with nothing on it is a surface people cross; a terrace with a fire feature at one end is somewhere people sit in October.
The Northwest Georgia climate is unusually good for this. The shoulder seasons are long, spring and autumn evenings are comfortable for months at a time, and a fire feature extends that at both ends. The constraint is summer, where the deciding factor is shade and airflow rather than heat alone, which is what a pergola or a covered structure is actually solving.
Decks belong in this conversation too, and BDS does them, which the rest of this site has been quiet about. Two of the three most recent reviews on the Google profile are deck jobs. On a falling lot where a terrace would need a retaining wall taller than the budget, a deck is frequently the better answer to the same problem.
Placement first, and placement is most of the design. A fire feature wants to be far enough from the house to be a destination and close enough to be convenient, out of the prevailing wind, and positioned so the seating around it faces something worth looking at rather than a fence.
Stone fire pits and outdoor fireplaces are built on their own footing, sized for the structure rather than sat on a paver field. A fireplace in particular is a masonry structure with real mass and it is built as one.
Seating walls are laid out at seat height and to a radius that lets people talk to each other, which is a narrower range than it sounds. Built too large, a fire circle becomes a place where nobody can hear across it.
Pergolas and shade structures are set on footings below frost depth and tied properly where they attach to the house. Water features get their basin, liner and pump sized together, with the reservoir large enough that it does not need topping up every third day.
Deck framing, decking and rail are built to the same standard as the hardscape, set to grade, with the structure detailed so water gets out of it rather than sitting in the connections.
Quoted per feature rather than by area, because a fire pit and an outdoor fireplace are different orders of work even though they do a similar job.
The biggest single step is fire pit to fireplace. A stone fire pit is a contained structure on a footing. A fireplace is a chimney, a firebox, a hearth and a serious amount of mass that has to be supported, and it is a multiple of the pit rather than an increment.
Then stone selection, whether the feature is freestanding or has to tie into existing hardscape, and utilities. Gas run to a fire feature, power and water to a water feature, and lighting into a pergola are all separate trades arriving on site.
For decks: height off the ground, which drives the framing and whether guard rail is required, plus the decking material and how much of the structure is visible from the yard.
A fire pit sited where the smoke blows straight at the seating on the prevailing wind, which turns a feature into something nobody uses twice.
A fire circle built too large to talk across, or seating walls set at the wrong height because the cap was added after the wall height was fixed.
A fireplace on an inadequate footing, which cracks at the joints within a few freeze-thaw cycles because nobody accounted for how much it weighs.
A water feature with a reservoir too small for its evaporation rate, so it is a chore rather than a feature by the second August.
And on decks, the classic: framing detailed so water sits in the connections, which is a structure that looks fine for six years and then does not.
Where this work leads
Quoted by the each, line by line, after a site walk. Across 21 counties from the shop in Floyd County.