It’s fire pit season

The weather is cooling here in Maleny – here’s a look at our new Milkcan fire pit and landscaping at our Oak Ridge Cottage.

Photography Mark Zeidler

Excavation works to our firepit area

We commenced landscaping of our fire pit area about six months ago. This area was filled with trees and whilst nice, when you have an amazing mountain view, these needed to be cut down so our cottage could enjoy those stunning views. What we were left with was a very blank space, and from there the idea grew – I could instantly envision a clear, flattened area that you could access via a set of stairs. Our plumber Darryl helped us out (he’s quite the handyman) and built the stairs for us along with use his excavator to make this space level. He even brought us our very first huge boulder as a house warming gift!

Shovelling pebbles into the wheelbarrow

From there we ordered some big boulders from a local landscape supplier, and rolled each one into place (yes it was heavy and hard work)! We lined the bottom of the steep hill with them to help with erosion. We then added in steel garden edging, smaller pebbles, plants, and bark. It was extremely difficult working on a very steep hill especially while trying to wheelbarrow down bark and pebbles, there were a few times we slipped over - but it was all worth it. We’ve seen so much growth of our plants, our beautiful Nefraya grasses are covered in plumes and look gorgeous swaying in the breeze.

This space isn’t very big, so we have chosen a smaller fire pit from Milkcan. This is the Phoenix 700mm size in the rust finish. I love the shape of this one and the lower height makes it easy to toast marshmallows. We’ve paired it with two of these Cape Cod chairs from Bunnings.