So how far from the finished top is the ring? Did you put in a pan below it? Doesn't appear to be one ... I'm still not clear if one is really needed for outdoors, same with the sand.

I'm stalled out on the Fire Pit. Those pieces are very heavy and hard to handle. I put that on hold to work on the BBQ and some other stuff.

At this point there is only 2000-3000 lbs of lave rock in the Pit. Most of the rock is below the burner and then we have a layer about 1 rock deep on top of the burner. No metal ring or pan yet. I may end up leaving it just gas for the time being.

Can't say I blame you...the gas is so convenient too

But the results are so subpar (at least for smoking and meat grilling).

I'm referring to the fire pit - I guess you could cook in it; we make s'mores in ours

...I guess I need to go eat dinner

I might buy or try to make a portable firepit that I can put on top of the rocks when I want to burn wood.

Something like this:

Nightmare - what brand/model is that gas fire pit burner and what size?

Thanks!

Love, love, love wood fires in the back yard.

We light one almost every night. If I had to choose, it'd be wood over gas. Sitting around at night poking at the fire is one of our favorite pastimes.

The burner itself is just a generic Stainless Steel burner from Thompsons. It is 36" daimeter.

Is that a West Coast chain? Not familiar with the name here on the other side of our great land!

5 Weeks later and the stucco yahoos are finally done. I hope to set the equipment this weekend.

I need to get rid of that dead X-Mas tree

Houston we have a problem.

We put a cost of stucco on the back side of the pool. The next day I noticed an obvious 'wet' spot on the wall.

The guys are out here busting tile off the outside of the spa right now. It looks like a crack in the bond beam. It sounds like the plan is to open up the crack and fill it with epoxy. The crack in the grout is inside the spa too, but it doesn't show up well on the photo.

Should I be concerned about anything else? Should I look for other points of failure? (where specifically) How common is this?

The gunite it wet. The PB is coming out to look at the problem again. The tile guys found a 3rd crack, it must be above the water line.

Ouch! Sorry to hear and see that dude. If it's a crack in the bond beam itself then I don't know if epoxy will cut it...

That is something I fear everyday as well. My first problem was a leak in the pipe feeding the bubblers but it was easy to fix. That looks pretty serious. If I recall your spa was elevated and close to the hill. Was there fill dirt put there - also did the pool builder do a soils test ? You may recall that I had an engineer/inspector fail me and I had to remove rebar and dig the sun shelf down to the pool floor depth. Is it possible they did not dig deep enough to eliminate a crack plane ? I do hope all gets resolved and that epoxy will take care of it.

The cracks are located right above the 'Key'.

No soil evalutation testing was performed. The majority of the slope is 15-16 year old 'fill' dirt from the original construction of the home/lot. They dug down, but did not put any dirt back for the spa area.

They came out to take another look yesterday. It sounds like they will try to do something with it this week.

Looking at that picture, the problem may have something to do with keeping the dirt in the bottom of the spa and having only a 4 to 8" shell on the bottom which in great part ties the spa to pool shell. Look at the engineering drawings and see if they followed the indications on the spa. Had my inspector not seen it I would not have caught the poor excavation on my sun shelf. Good luck tomorrow.

Any update?

Not yet.