Building A House - Installing flagstone in our patio  


Building a natural stone bench with a small fire pit / table in the garden
 

We wanted  a small stone bench with a table that doubles as a fire pit in our garden so can we do that ourself we asked? Well sure we can and so can you. As you can see in the attached step by step photos we just went ahead to go for it, and I need to mention we had no prior experience in working with either stones nor cement.

Our project needed the following materials, allot of natural stones whatever looks nice and you can find in your area or if needed you can buy some at your construction material supplier. 2 bags of cement, about 10 bags of sand, some leftover platic pieces or styropor as filling material like old plastic bottles (to fill the gaps between the stones, see images), then for the cover some old broken tiles and cement plus filler (grout) in the colors of your liking. The quanities of the materials of course vary depending of the size of the garden bench and fire pit you choose.

 

 
This is the type of stone we used


We layout the stones on the flor according to the size and shape we want the bench to become.

 


We mix the cement and build the bench stone by stone, the inside can be filled using some plastic trash bottles, styropor or whatever you have around.

 

For the cement mix we use 3 parts sand and 2 parts cement plus adding  water. Mix well either by hand or in a  bucket with a drill and the respective concrete mix attachment.

NAs you can see in the following images, as mentiones stone by stone, and then level the top and back out with plain cement mixture to give it a leveled base for the placing or instalation of the tiles. As tiles we used some leftover tiles that we broke into small pieces. Insalling the tiles also is easy, add the mixed tile cement over the surface where you want the tiles (either little by little aarea or add the mixture just tile by tile on the back of the tiles a clue them on the cement, then fill the gaps with the grout (choose the one with sand for wide gaps)

 

The finished products can be seen in the last image, we paited the stones with a sealing marine lacquer in order to protect the stones and giving it the cool colorintensive wet look.

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