One of the biggest issues with our condo in Chicago was that we didn’t have any outdoor space, either private or shared, which meant no grilling and no sitting out around a fire at night. This has now changed.
We have a walk-out basement onto a concrete patio that’s about 10′ x 15′ and on it we set up a portable fire pit we bought from Walmart, along with a couple of camping chairs. Linnea grabbed some firewood from Menard’s, and we got a lovely little fire going, after some false starts.
We had put logs in the pit and gotten a bit of paper from packing to use as kindling, but couldn’t get it to stay lit long enough to get the logs burning. At one point, one of us realized hey, we have literally 20 acres of dried out corn stalks that would be perfect kindling and brought a few handfuls of it back from the field. In short order, our latent pyromania had been slaked and we had a lovely little fire going.
Of course we plan on making this a regular thing. Which means we will need more stuff to make this happen: a firewood bin for keeping the logs dry and off the ground, and a ton of firewood so that we don’t have to worry about lugging more of it home every week.
We also wanted to have a place to sit and actually eat outside – we have an amazing grill, but we’d been eating from it with plates perched on our laps, which does not do it justice. A trip to IKEA netted us a 4-8 person patio table (it has folding leaves) and 4 comfy chairs. I was tasked with putting it all together, and with my trusty drill and a couple of beers, I made short work of the construction.
Our little walk-out patio is now ready for summer!