What the Fuck is With Fire Pits?

I think it's because of Covid, so many people were gathering outside. At least where I am.

I feel like getting a fire pit just to annoy OP.

Gotta have a fire pit to warm me while I recline in my stone couch

They are good for illegally burning yard waste!

You sound miserable OP

Parts of the southwest / dry California.... they are illegal for a good part of the year

Fire pit table! For when you want Korean bbq, which will be once a year…unless you’re Korean

My neighbors just installed one, and now they're outside with their friends making noise until 1AM on the weekends.

Of course, they're fucking Millenials.

Even if you’re Korean, r7.

I loved sitting at the fire pit at a bar in West LA called the Apache* in the late '70s. I never went inside except to get another drink. I thought every bar should have one.

*Yes, I know there was a bar by that name in the Valley, but that must have been later. The one I'm talking about was close to where the Santa Monica and San Diego Freeways intersect, off Olympic IIRC.

“Just follow the signs to the fire pit! Tee hee. Refreshments to come”

Get it [italic] personalized [/italic]

You want fire pits, cunts?

I'll give you fire pits.

I make my own

I think they got popular with the rise of the prepper movement & the Survivor type reality shows. Everyone wanted to sit around a fire pit and vote people off the island…while making s’mores & drinking beer

It never fails. I'm ALWAYS the one the awful smoke chases. Embers too.

You don’t need to kill the lawn and horror the trees to make a fire pit. Simmer down, OP.

You'll use it the first year and then never again

Fire pit?

How clever. I hadn't thought of that!

My sister loves to send me Snapchat snaps from hers.

After a certain number of them, it gets boring.

@r19, Yes you did, but it was winter and just too cold to bother

They stink to high holy heaven, all that rancid smoke drifting all over the neighborhood.

Thankfully they are outlawed in my small city. I loved the look on the face of my neighbor down the street, when he bought one of these outdoor stick contraptions and lit it up on a hot summer day, but was confronted a short time later by the fire department who drove right up to his house in a big truck. Sorry Charlie, put it out and throw it out, no can do in this neck of the woods.

There was no such bar, r10

R22: Gladys Kravitz

r24: Gladys Kravitz with clean lungs and no stank air.

The trend will end quickly enough when some of the breeders sprogs wander into one while mommy is scrolling through Pinterest. Lawsuits will inevitably follow.

MAGAts love them. They pretend they’re in Alaska or Colorado, all masculine & pine-y, living in a $600k mountain cabin, sitting outside by the fire pit, shotgun resting across their lap as they scan the scrub for eyes reflecting the light of the fire….a wolf, maybe. Or kye-ote. Or a mountain lion.

They cock their cowboy hat (or red trucker cap) and wait….”I’ll protect my family against all threats, animal or constitutional,” they say as they spit and swear an oath.

God. Family (actually “families” since it’s marriage number 3 and there are scattered kids living with grandmas & aunts), America. The [italic] right [/italic] America, of course. The red blooded America that loves guns, Jesus, freedom …… and who loves a man with an orange smeared face and bleached hair pompadoured to hide a bald spot & surgical scar, wearing a baggy suit, overly long red tie, lifts in his shoes and several cans of hairspray atop his head. The Donald. We’d die for him. Go to jail for him. We send him our money. We decorate our truck for him and join caravans of like minded free thinkers and we all take to the road in his honor.

But for now, we’ll just sit here by the fire pit, like our prehistoric ancestors did. Roasting our weiners, getting toasted, protecting kin and country. Here’s to good friends, tonight is kinda special….

[quote]I think they got popular with the rise of the prepper movement & the Survivor type reality shows. Everyone wanted to sit around a fire pit and vote people off the island…

Fire pits have been a thing for the past few hundreds of thousands of years.

Survivor has been on for 20 years.

They've become a must have feature in the past few years so that had little to do with it.

Really I just think it's because people selling houses use them as a focal point to encourage the use of outdoor spaces. It draws emphasis to it.

Otherwise they're there for entertainment purposes. Watching fires burn can lower blood pressure and is generally soothing. They keep outdoor spaces warm and extend the use of the space throughout the year. You can use them for cooking as well.

Smoke follows beauty, R16.

[quote] Fire pits have been a thing for the past few hundreds of thousands of years.

No.

Really?

I didn’t know the suburbanites of the Stone Age put fire pits in their stick built housing developments in their 1/4 acre sod backyards between the foundation plantings, the driveway and the neighbors vinyl fence.

Oh…look. Here’s an ancient suburban fire pit dating from the 900s AD, recently excavated by Norwegian archeologists

Is this where we make the “sa-mores”? Do we put graham cracker in fire too?

I LOVE my fire table. It's propane, so.......not the same as a "macho" fire pit. But it throws a fair amount of heat to extend the outdoor entertaining season about a month on either end.

Everyone loves to sit around a fire, all cozy.....watching the flame. It's tribal and communal on a deep level. I believe it appeals to our ancestral instincts.

What is this "backyard" of which you speak?

[quote]I didn’t know the suburbanites of the Stone Age ....

Oh, look! A sarcastic response that only serves to prove how obtuse you are.

The biggest difference between a fire pit and a campfire is the hole.

The earliest fire pits found date back to hundreds of thousands of years in (of course) Israel and South Africa during the middle Paleolithic period. There's even (supposedly) one in Tel Aviv that had remains dating back 300,000 years.

No one in their right mind would sit around a fucking fire pit here in the shitstain south in the summer. Nothing like roasting and sweating like boar hogs in the heat and humidity. Even in the winter who wants to smell like wood smoke? Even when grilling out, we tend to the food and haul it back into the ac house.

OP is a frau, Stop humoring her.

We have one at the lake house. Fun place to meet, play guitar, drink, and just be outside. Everyone I know who has a fire pit in the burbs, usually has one or more fireplaces in their homes. Those folks usually also have the obligatory outdoor TV and outdoor sofa.

Here is an ancient Mesopotamian fire pit in the midst of a sin-cleansing lake. It is believed those who cleansed their sins in the lake would then sit by the fire and have all evil burned away from their souls.

"The biggest difference between a fire pit and a campfire is the hole"

Funny, that's the same difference between a straight man and a Gay top

[quote] The earliest fire pits found date back to hundreds of thousands of years

Oh look! Nobody ever knew this. Who would dream ancient people used fire in the ground? That’s exactly the same thing as a suburban American fire pit today.

Anyone can have a campfire without much prep. Can we say the same about a straight man or gay top?

The same people who build fire pit patios are complaining about how hard life is for them and how great their parents & grandparents had it in the old days. Meanwhile, their parents had a smoky Joe in the backyard and their grandparents thought they were living high on the hog when they got a fondue pot for Christmas.

Ha, OP. I just finished building my third patio on my property a few weeks ago. It's a firepit patio, surrounded by gardens and a hedge. It connects to my covered/shade patio via a walkway. I also have a small patio between my house and the shade patio.

I threw a party to celebrate having finally gotten it built (been meaning to do it for decades), and people had an absolute blast with it. I have plenty of patio space, so social distancing wasn't an issue, and each patio has different views of the gardens.

I did have another party that ran till 2 am. Actually, it was my sister's. She asked if she could use my property to throw a party, since it's much nicer for entertaining than her yard is.

Anyhow, since then I've been having fires a couple nights a week. I get off work (home office), start the fire, cook myself dinner over the fire, and just lean back and enjoy the fire and looking at the evening sky. It's incredibly relaxing.

Since I'm no dummy, I designed the area for the firepit patio to be slightly lower grade than the gardens. Between that and the hedges, the air is pretty still, so there's usually not an issue with smoke blowing around.

Sounds divine, R43. Would love to see photos.

i have one. it's a wood burning portable one. i really don't use it that much. in my area, fire pits have to be 10 feet away from any building.

"Anyone can have a campfire without much prep. Can we say the same about a straight man or gay top? "

Oh, honey, I'm much more prepared to get fucked then I am to play Campfire Girl

I have a cheap portable one in my backyard in San Francisco that's great to use on windless evenings. I can burn scraps of wood or, more often, I use the insert with stones to burn alcohol. It's great to sit around with friends while drinking wine and smoking weed. Everyone is draped in blankets. It doesn't really warm us up (that's what the hut tub is for); it's just fun to look at while chatting. Having those two items in my yard extend the living space of my tiny 900 sq' house.

I think it's the Millennials' version of us Baby Boomer generation's Ricardos & Mertzes-style 1950s stone slab backyard barbecues built for poolside cookouts where the husbands wore Hawaiian shirts and their wives (or mistresses) sashayed around in their high-heeled mules.

I am 55 years old and had one growing up at my family’s lake house. It was built against a rock coming out of the water against the ground, surrounded with stones. Some people had elaborate outdoor fireplaces with a chimney, others would just make a campfire on their beach.

I thought about building one when I bought my house but there are a lot of bats where I live and I don’t really like spending time outside after dark.

I called the fire dept on my neighbor who finally lit their pile of branches, trash, and 4x4 timbers that was stacked over 6 feet high and maybe 4 feet wide. This thing was about 3 feet from the chain link fence dividing our yards and built inside a circle of rocks placed on the ground. The flames had to shooting 15 feet high. If it was a normal fire pit fine, but something like this does not belong in a small backyard.

Fire pits are the suburban couples’ justification to do more drinking.