DIY Sandbox!

The girls love the sandboxes at the park. They'll spent ages shovelling, raking, dumping and loading sand into trucks. I looked at buying one of the name brand plastic ones, but with two almost 3-year olds, I was worried that it might not be big enough. So, I decided to build my own, with the help of my friend and her tools.

I decided on a 4' x 4' sandbox with little seats in the corners, that also provide a bit of extra stability to the sandbox.

What I used:

• 1 16' x 10" x 2" board  (Home Dep0t cut into 4 4' boards for me)
• 4 identical pieces of scrap wood that HD gave me for free!
• Weed netting (I bought a 25' roll)
• 24 2.5" wood screws (4 per side and 2 for each seat)
• Power drill
• Staple gun
• Circular Saw

So, I should have taken pictures at each step of the process, but completely forgot. I got the idea for this sandbox from this blog. I did not use the metal brackets because the two extremely helpful and competent-looking gentlemen at HD said that 3-4 screws in each side would be plenty strong enough. Simple is better! 

We did not staple the weed netting all the way to the top either (see pictures on that other blog) because I thought it would look nicer if it was hidden. This is what ours looked like with the weed netting installed. We did two layers; one horizontal and then one vertical. Since we decided to put ours on the stone patio, the weed netting wasn't as critical as it would have been if we had put it on the grass. 

The little seats in the corner are a "nice to have". If my friend hadn't had a circular saw, I probably would have skipped that step. 

It took the two of us exactly 2 hours to build the sandbox. The box cost me $40 and the sand was about $60, BUT one of the kind HD gentlemen mentioned above gave me a sand discount. We used 12 20-kg bags of sand. I would HIGHLY recommend getting play sand. It feels like beach sand and is nice and clean. 

My brother, Michael, and his girlfriend, Paige, took the girls to the park and for gelato yesterday afternoon. They arrived home to the finished sandbox. Quinn sees it for the first time:

And it's a hit!