The one element of the swing set that hasn’t been complete since I posted about it was the sandbox. I know that there are a lot of strong feelings among parents about sand boxes and even sand at playgrounds. Lots of people seem to feel that they’re dirty and full of bacteria since they can easily become litter boxes for neighborhood cats, and some parents just don’t want the sand coming into their houses in every shoe and fold of clothing day after day (the struggle is real). I can understand both of those arguments, but for me the tradeoffs are worth it because our kids love sand play so much. I want to make our backyard a place where they have lots of options for entertaining themselves, and giving them a great sandbox as an option was important to me. Some good friends of ours in New York have a wonderful sandbox that was SUCH a hit with all of the kids, so that was my vision.

Our friends’ sandbox in New York, and my reason for wanting a great one

When we chose our swing set plans, I chose it in large part for the size of the fort deck, which also turns out to be the size of the sandbox below. We went with 6’x6′ because I wanted to make sure that all three kids had plenty of space to play. Once my dad completed construction I figured that we could get sand in there within a couple of days, the easy part, right? We ordered a pallet full of “play sand” in bags from Home Depot, only to find a California 65 warning label that informed us that the sand contained known cancer-causing chemicals that were proven to cause organ damage. Naturally we were alarmed. As it turns out, silica (which is in all sand, more or less) is dangerous when inhaled, so the safety of play sand has a lot to do with the particle size. We talked to a number of people we trusted and decided to return the bagged sand to Home Depot (they were very gracious about picking it up and even refunded our delivery fee) and instead have washed sand delivered by a local landscaping company. Who knows, it could be exactly the same stuff, but psychologically it felt better. We also figured that if sand is dangerous, it’s the same stuff we played in as kids, so how awful could this really be?

We had one cubic yard delivered, dumped into our driveway, and borrowed a neighbor’s garden cart to transport it to the back. A cubic yard of sand is a lot of sand, y’all.

Jonah was a big helper. He was totally into helping me shovel the sand into the cart and then into the sandbox.

To try to avoid the neighborhood litter box problem I made a cover for it. I found a number of places that sell custom sandbox covers, but they cost roughly $80 and I just wasn’t willing to spend that on it. Instead, I bought a roll of affordable shade fabric that came with a lacing needle and cord, two six-foot pieces of PVC with end caps, and put it together in an evening after the kids went to bed. It cost around $30 total and it works great. Even better, I ended up using the same material to provide a barrier between the dirt and the sand (so that the kids wouldn’t mix the two if they dig all the way down). That saved me from having to buy a huge roll of landscaping material when I only needed six feet.

Sewing two ends of the shade fabric onto the PVC was easy, and the needle and cord that it came with was perfect.

The cover lays across the sandbox nicely, with the PVC weighing it down on two ends. It’s lightweight enough that it’s easy to roll up when the kids want to play, and it’s breathable, which means rain will go through rather than pooling on top and causing a mess when we want to remove it, and the sand can dry out beneath as needed. I’m really happy with the way it turned out, and especially the price.

The kids are loving it and have spent a lot of time in it over the past two days, and we look forward to sharing it with friends.

When it comes to home projects I wouldn’t say that I’m especially handy. When the people on home shows are searching for a fixer that they can “put their stamp on” I’m genuinely perplexed. Sure, I have a small and modestly equipped toolbox and a cordless drill, and according to Jonah that makes me a construction worker, but I cannot imagine why anyone would want to spend every weekend engaged in manual labor if they didn’t have to.

Now that I’m a homeowner, however, I’m beginning to see the appeal of learning how to care for and maybe even improve our space a little bit. And if I can do it myself while saving some money, that’s even better, right?

We were fortunate to get a number of money-saving hand-me-downs from my parents when we moved into the house, and one of those was a patio set that my parents have had since I was around Jonah’s age. I have lots of memories of it in the backyard where I grew up, and I love that it has so much history. It’s a nice sturdy wrought iron set, but two of the chairs were broken, and the whole set had some rust and a lot of wear.

When my parents gave it to us, my dad suggested that we could paint it if we wanted to, and both K and I thought that sounded like a fun way to brighten up the backyard. I’ve never spray painted anything in my life, so I had few appropriate expectations going into this project. I did a little bit of Pinterest exploration to gather tips, chose a color that we were excited about (Rustoleum Lagoon), and went shopping for supplies.

I was thinking of painting it on the patio, and I’m so glad that I called my dad beforehand to say, “How on earth do I do this? Isn’t it all going to end up covered in leaves and flower petals?” He told me that the garage was a far better choice (no kidding) so I spread out a number of plastic tarps across the center of the garage, moved the furniture inside, and got to work. After washing it and letting it dry, I started with a coat of Rusty Metal Primer, which turned it all a solid rust color.

This phase of the project gave me a pretty solid understanding of how unpleasant this whole experience was going to be. I learned a number of valuable lessons, which I will now pass along to you, dear reader.

1. Have appropriate protective clothing, gloves, and footwear. I failed to buy/have appropriate painting clothes (I tossed a lot of old stuff in the move) so I started in an old t-shirt and leggings, with plastic grocery bags tied over my shoes. It didn’t take long to realize that when you step in paint on a thin plastic tarp while wearing grocery bags as shoes, your feet will stick to the tarp and tear it to shreds. Also, if you have a lot of exposed skin, you’ll end up scrubbing paint off of your face, arms, and ankles with industrial hand cleaner like I did. It was only after the first day that it occurred to me that I should probably also have a mask on, since the fumes are absolutely awful, and that eye protection wasn’t a bad idea. Those also prevented a lot of the face paint issues.
2. Buy way more paint than you think you’ll need. The first challenge was that no one seemed to carry the color that we wanted in gloss, which is what we were interested in. We initially bought the six cans that our local Walmart had in stock, thinking that surely it would be sufficient (which is so completely laughable at this point, since this project required so much paint), and ultimately ended up also buying the last four on Amazon as well as an additional four at a Walmart two hours away. I also used a clear gloss coat because the paint guy recommended it and…I mean, it can’t hurt, right? I had no idea what I was doing, but I can tell you first-hand that running out of paint when you’re all suited up and just want to finish this beast is not a lot of fun.
3. Tarp everything. I’m so glad that we didn’t do this on the patio because our house would probably be teal right now. While I put tarps down on a pretty wide area, a huge portion of the garage floor (a perimeter of at least a couple of feet on all sides) is teal now, as is a portion of our driveway, the threshold of the door to the mudroom, and a plastic car of Jonah’s is covered in a fine layer of rusty metal primer. I had no idea how far spray paint spray would fly, and I’m sure that being outdoors only exacerbated the problem. Fortunately K has been very understanding about this.
4. Budget lots of time. I waffled about including this one, because if you’re a skilled spray painter and you’re highly efficient, you can probably do this far more quickly than I did. Here’s the thing though: spray paint is weird. You either have to finish the job within an hour (or so) or you have to wait something like 48 hours to put on your next coat. Because we kept running out of paint I wasn’t able to finish very much of it in one block of time, so I’d get a layer on and then know that I had to wait at least two days before I could come back to it. The whole thing took me two or three weeks of very spread out painting sessions.

When I was in New York, a friend asked me what project I was working on that I was really excited about. I asked her if it was possible to be excited about a project but also hate everything about the process. After finishing the table and knowing that I had four chairs ahead of me, I declared that we should have just bought new, colorful patio furniture. I’m not sure that we saved all that much money ($60 in welding to repair the broken chairs, roughly 25-30 cans of paint, plastic tarps, rubber gloves, disposable masks, safety goggles), and the process wasn’t the slightest bit enjoyable, but I do really like the end result. It makes the patio a lot more fun, and the kids seem to love it. They wanted to eat dinner at the table the first night that it was back out on the patio (even though it was something like 55 degrees out).

While the furniture was in progress in the garage, they would come home from school and tell me how pretty the chairs looked, which was surprisingly gratifying.

I’ve been looking forward to making our yard more playful, and I feel like this is a big step in that direction. My parents return from Charleston in a week’s time and the next big project on the agenda is a swing set (despite Jonah’s faith in my construction worker abilities, that’s way out of my league – we need to call in Papa Doc for that one). I’ve been debating between a kit and a total DIY approach and you would think that this experience would have made that choice clear, but since I expect a swing set to be a ton of work no matter how we slice it I’m still undecided. More to come on that one when it happens.