Easy Peasy DIY: Make A Sandbox From A Storage Bin

I was chatting with Tiffani about wanting to find a small sandbox for Scarlette because we keep a running tab for one another on what to look for when we’re garage sale-ing. (That’s friendship in your thirties, y’all.) She mentioned that someone in her homeschool group told her about making a sandbox out of one of those plastic bins that go under the bed.

And I was all A) That is genius and B) I bet they totally found that shiz on Pinterest. That sounds just like something Pinterest would do, making a sandbox out of a storage bin.

So then I went searching on Pinterest and fell down a rabbit hole of completely elaborate homemade sandboxes complete with canopies and lawn gnomes and hidden panels that turn into picnic tables and painted to look like a replica of Hogwarts. I’m just kidding about that last one. (Although someone should totally do that because it would be the most epic sandbox ever.)

I finally found what I was looking for, and it really was as simple as I envisioned.

So here is why this is the best sandbox ever: When we are done playing with it, it just rolls under our table!

I picked up this sterilite one with wheels, which was a great tip from Stuff Parents Need because I put two forty pound bags of sand in that sucker. Turns out, wheels are definitely a necessity when trying to move eighty pounds of play sand if you are commonly mistaken for a twelve year old girl, which I am. I also put our splash mat (we have this one) under it so that I can dump most of the lost sand back in before I close it back up and that seems to work pretty well.

I wanted something small-ish and portable because we spend the majority of our morning doing “stations” on the back porch and I didn’t want to take away from our play space permanently. Also, I was pretty sure Scarlette’s sensory issues would prevent her from actually putting her feet IN said sandbox so I wasn’t worried about it being too small for her to sit in. Turns out, she fits with lots of room to spare seeing as how she is tiny but I was right and she prefers to sit next to it and only play in the sand with her hands.

Ours ended up costing about $10 because of how there were no prices listed for the storage boxes and when we checked out we discovered there was also no bar code on it. The cashier was a very sweet old man who said, “How about I charge you seven dollars?” And I replied “They are definitely more than seven dollars. I think they might be around twelve?” And he said “Well, seven dollars sounds good to me.” And so I was all “OKAY!”

And then he forgot to put all of the food we bought in our cart and we didn’t realize it until we were home and I had to drive all the way back to the store so that we’d have something to eat for dinner. There is probably some sort of lesson in that story.

Anyhow, I didn’t buy her a bunch of sand toys because we had a lot of toys for the water table that I thought would work for both but I did let her pick out a bucket and shovel. She asked for a purple one and then she spent all morning going “YEAH! I BEEYULD DA SHAND CASHLE! OH BOY!” It was basically the cutest thing ever, kind of like my kid.