Hesitant Handyman Builds - A Simple Sandbox
Redwood Highway by Audionautix.com
Sleepytime for Alton by Amanda Laine
The Joys of Parenthood
My son is creeping up on three years old, in a “Holy crap, where have the last three years gone?!” manner. With baby number two on the way, we’re heading into another season of change in our household, and while I like to think we’ve got this whole parenting thing down pretty good (we’ve had friends comment that we’re basically like third kid status after witnessing our non-reaction to Alton falling over last year at the drive in–we helped him up, said “dust yourself on, you’re fine,” he was good), presently we have the one child outnumbered–the odds will be even in a couple of months here. It’s an exciting and terrifying time.
Where am I going with this?
I’ll admit that was a fairly random lead-in to a build project, especially a sandbox design. If you’ve been around me any period of time, you realize that random is kind of my wheelhouse. If you’re new here, I promise we’re going somewhere, there just might be a couple of detours in the run-up. If you just want to get to the build portion and skip my yammering, I promise there’s a clearly marked building section down below.
Why a sandbox?
Sandboxes sometimes seem like all a part of “the dream” – a house, two kids, and a sandbox in the backyard. Clearly, there’s nothing more American, right?
Well… Sandboxes aren’t actually an American innovation. They were derived from the idea of sand gardens in Germany around 1850, and the idea for those came about from the ideas of German Pedagogue Fredrich Froebel. (I’m sure I mispronounced that in the video, those of you who speak German fluently, rest assured by the time you read this that my brother in law, who speaks fairly solid college German, has already watched the video and sent me a text lambasting me for my lazy German pronunciation. Please don’t pile on, I apologize but I took high school Spanish.)
Anyway, what makes sandboxes popular is that they offer an open space for kids to play freely, use their imaginations. Alton specifically loves any and every piece of construction equipment he sees, so I’m working on building up his Tonka collection so he can get a whole construction site running in there. And really? If you want to forego the concept of the plastic turtles or crabs of my youth, a sandbox isn’t hard to build. At all. Like, I drew up plans for this, then completely changed them on the fly without reworking the plan. As you can see, it turned out okay. (Literally, I built the sandbox, THEN created the digital model on this variation. It’s not that there was anything wrong with the original model, but in hindsight I was trying to over-engineer a box to make it more pretty, kind of losing sight of the fact that MY CHILDREN ARE GOING TO PLAY IN THIS AND DON’T CARE ABOUT THE DESIGN AESTHETIC. Sometimes a simple structure is the best solution. and if I wanted to do something crazy like a sliding barn door top cover later to make it prettier, honestly? This design kind of leaves room for modification.
(Sliding barn door top cover? That sounds like a terrible idea for another video later. )
For those who followed along my intro, you’re my favorite people. Don’t tell the skippers. 😉
The Clearly Marked Building Section
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Required Materials
For those of you who skipped my long-winded introduction to just get to the part where I tell you how to build a sandbox, welcome back. Let’s get cracking! (Also, ignore any tiny text you think you see immediately before this section. Like you did the rest of the paragraphs I poured my heart and soul into before this section. =)
- Two (2) 12′ 2×10 boards (Note: If you want to screw around with the dimensions, you can adjust as needed. I was building a 6’x6′ sandbox, so I bought 12′ boards and chopped them in half. If you want smaller or bigger, adjust your length accordingly)
- One (1) 8′ 2×3 board
- Two (2) 8′ 2×6 board
- Wood Glue
- Screws
- Weed block fabric
- Staple gun with staples
- A crap ton of sand (Kidding. It’s really only a half ton.)
- Advil. Lots of Advil. (I won’t spoil it for you but it might be because of one of the other items on the list…)
Required Tools
- Miter saw
- Drill
- Random Orbit Sander
- Track Saw (Optional – I also could have used the miter saw, but since I won the drawing for the Kreg Adaptive Cutting System (ACS) back at Workbench Conference, I really wanted an excuse to run it. Plus, it actually allowed me some nice, repeatable 45 degree angled cuts for what I was doing.)
- A good chiropractor and/or massage therapist
The Process
Step One – Break down the stock
Like with any build that comes from wood, you’ll need to break your lumber down into smaller, usable pieces. Your cut list is going to look something like this:
- 2×10 – 6′ (x4)
- 2×3 – 9″ (x4 — Yes, I realize that you were told to buy an 8′ board for about 3′ of lumber. If you have a spare 2×3 lying around that is 36″ or longer, you COULD just dice that up on the old miter saw. Or use random 2×4 offcuts. Or 4×4 offcuts. Really, what you need here is something that can be used to join the box corners to, while I designed it with a specific board, there’s room for a little DIY jazz interpretation here. You just need four 9″ lengths of some species of wood. )
- 2×6 – So this gets a little complicated because these aren’t straight cuts, and my methodology was on the fly here, but the corner benches are made from two pieces – a trapezoid and a triangle. If we go by the measurements produced by Sketchup, the base of the triangle is 11″, the top of the trapezoid is 11″, and the bottom of the trapezoid is 22″. I didn’t actually measure when I did mine, though: Once I set up the basic box form, I laid out my first triangular cut by foot-clamping the 2×6 to a corner and marking off where it needed to be cut. Once I cut that, I foot clamped it on the corner and laid another 2×6 length out, marking where my trapezoid cut needed to be. Once I had the first set, I used these to dial in stops on my Kreg ACS table, then ran off the remaining three pieces of each. You can do something similar with your miter saw, I just didn’t.
Step two – Sand
Look, I don’t feel like you need me to explain to you why splinters will make your child less likely to play in a sand box that you’ve spent hours building for them. I hate sanding as much as the next guy, but unless you’re the type of parent who wants to turn splinters into a metaphor about life and have 90s-sitcom-esque sit downs where you put your arm around your kid and have a heart to heart where you tell them that everything going to be alright and what a good lesson in overcoming adversity this is, just sand the dang wood. Make sure it’s smooth. Thank you, next step.
Step 3 – Assemble the box
So to start out, pair off one of your 2×10 sides with one of your 2×3 (or 2×4 or 4×4–I really don’t care which you selected, so long as it is sturdy enough to handle screws). If, for some reason, you get to this step and somehow don’t have all four of the side pieces and/or all four of the corners, I’d recommend going back to the cut list and seeing what you’ve missed. You should have an even number of both.
Once paired off, I started by attaching the 2x3s at one end of the 2x10s. The box is all butt joints, nothing fancy here, we’re not building a colonial style writing desk. I spread some glue on one of the 3′ faces, clamped it squared with one end of the board, then screwed it in as so:
I then completed assembly on site–I applied wood glue to the end of the 2×10 and the edge of the 2×3, clamped the opposite end of one of the other sides to the 2×3, then drove more screws in (making sure to offset the screws from where I had driven the screws on the other side of the corner). Once finished, I had–you guessed it! A large wooden box!
Step four – Sand
Now I know what you’re going to say – “didn’t we already do that one?”
Not THAT sand, sand like the stuff that goes in the sandbox.
“But why am I putting sand in an unfinished sandbox? Wasn’t there supposed to be seating?”
I’d like to be able to spout of some eloquent technical reason why you should put the sand in before completing the sandbox. I’d love it if I could say “I’m glad you asked! The reason you do that is because it’s really hard to evenly distribute the sand in the box, and so experts recommend that you add the sand BEFORE you put the seating on. It also reduces the potential for getting sand transference off of your bench pieces.”
If I told you any of that, I’d be lying. Literally the only reason I did it this way is because my wife and I bought the sand toys for Alton during the trip to pick up the play sand, and during the ENTIRE assembly process, he was standing just outside of my camera shot, bucket of sand toys in hand, asking me if it was time to put sand in. It’s all the joys of “Are we there yet?” on a road trip, without any of the scenic views or a complete oral history of the state of Wyoming. I present this order because it’s how I built it, but my less-humorous PDF file has the order that normal people would probably build it. Feel free to swap steps 4 and 5 in the PDF if you want to get the full experience!
So the amount of sand you want will determine how much sand you need to buy–Quikrete has a handy calculator on their website that helps you figure this stuff out, so I’m not even going to bother trying to tell you the complex algebra that goes into figuring out the volume of sand required for the sandbox. I can tell you in my case, I bought twenty (20) 50-pound bags of play sand, which the gentleman at Home Depot was more than happy to help me load into my truck, but he couldn’t come home to help me unload it. What this meant is, because I didn’t want a half ton of sand in my truck bed while I was at work the next day, it was me, all by my lonesome, moving a half ton of sand from the truck to the backyard by wheelbarrow at 10:00 at night.
The next day, I started by adding weed block fabric to the bottom of the box–I thought I’d destroyed whatever was growing in my chosen sandbox spot multiple times over, but it kept coming back, so I gave it one last solid weed whacking before covering it up with the fabric. I then stapled the fabric around the edges of the box–I expected dropping a half ton of sand on top will keep it in place anyway, but figured it can’t hurt to be sure it’s not going to get dug up by an ambitious toddler.
Once the fabric was laid, I dumped in the sand and spread it as evenly as possible across the sandbox. In case you missed the last two references, I moved a thousand pounds of sand. Multiple times. By. My. Self.
I chased that with Advil and a chiropractor appointment. Because I work in a desk job and physical labor isn’t part of my everyday, so moving that much sand multiple times wrecked me.
Step five – Assemble Seating
Okay, this is the weird no-measure assembly step. As a noted above, I took my 2×6 and “foot clamped” (see: stepped on/kneeled on) it while marking where my triangle needed to be cut from. Once I had the corner triangle cut, I foot clamped that one onto the corner and marked my trapezoid cuts. The good news is, once I had the first set, I was able to set up my Kreg ACS to make the repeating cuts pretty painlessly. If you don’t have an ACS, no worries–you can also do this with your miter saw. Just set up your cutting angle and use your first of each board as the template for the other three pieces you need.
Once the pieces were cut I affixed them to the corners with screws–2 screws into the triangle, four screws into the trapezoid.
Digital Model 
Completed Build
A couple of post-build notes
- If your neighborhood is anything like mine, you probably have people whose cats wander around like they own the place. I’m a dog person myself, and I personally think cats are jerks. (If you’re a cat person, I’m sorry, but I’m allergic and the cats in our neighborhood keep trying to eat my local squirrel population. I’ve broken up more than one potential Animal Planet repeat in my hard by loosing the defender of the yard, Mahler, who isn’t any bigger than some of the cats but he barks enough to scare them back to their own yard, even though the squirrels no longer view him as a threat.) All that to say, if you have a bunch of furry jerks in your neighborhood roaming around, they’re probably going to find your lovely sand box and think someone is pampering them with a super-deluxe giant litter box, the cat equivalent of the Cottenelle plush ply toilet paper. (Have I mentioned cats are jerks?) It’d behoove you to cover up the sand box, unless you want your child to stumble across weird “rocks” in the sandbox with their Tonka trucks, if you catch my meaning. We bought a massive tarp with a drawstring that’s worked pretty well, but it’s deffinitely larger than what we needed. It turns out that there aren’t a lot of 7×7 tarps in existence, which would probably be about perfect for our box. At some point I might make a more elaborate cover, but for now, this works.
- Alton loves the sandbox. So, apparently, do all the spiders in the neighborhood, as during our lovely candid video shoot for the video, we compiled this lovely outtake reel of us just smashing spiders.
