White Trash Sandbox

Today Elsie is two!

My poor daughters. It must be a horriable thing to have a mother who is always thinking in the long run. While that's help to build a pretty nice house (Rejuvination fixtures, wrought iron beds, and other items that will stand the test of time and use), it doesn't bode very well for a cool sandbox. Since mom figures how long are they going to play with the stinking thing anyway.

Last year Tim was supposed to pick Elsie up one of those cheap plastic sandboxes for her birthday. Well he never did. So this year it was pretty easy to decide what to get her. We were at a friend's daughter's birthday party and Elsie was playing with a lovely sand/water table. I mentioned to my friend that she was going to be getting a sandbox soon. The friend told me how much her kids liked the sand table and that it was pretty cheap. Her idea of pretty cheap and mine are different, and I knew this before she even opened her mouth to tell me what the price was.

So after weeks of bouncing ideas back and forth in my brain I've come up with my solution to the sand table. Assembly below:

1) Go to your local store and buy a plastic storage box with a lid (there were bigger storage boxes than this, and if I had boys I proably would have gotten one, but the girls aren't intersted in driving big trucks through sand) and two trash baskets who's openings are wider than the bottoms (for support). If I had gotten the bigger box I probably would have had to make this a four leg table, but this way I can just get away with two.

2) Dig around in your pile of house repair stuff and find an old tube of sealent/adhesive. Turn the trash cans up-side down and generously apply the sealent to the bottoms (I did all of this right were I planned on setting the sandbox so I don't have to worry about moving the thing and upsetting the seal).

3) Place the bottom of the box on the bottom of the trash cans so that the weight of the sand will be supported in the most effective manner.

4) Add sand.

5) Stick a few of the fad plastic dishes that were on extream mark-down in the sand of lots of scooping/pouring fun. Finish it all off with the lid of the plastic tote so the sand stays nice and clean.

6) Enjoy with your bossy older sister.

I Might Have Started A Project (But Don't Hold Your Breath)

OK, I fully realize that this is the most unproductive looking after picture any houseblogger has ever posted. And I don't have a before... but you have to cut me a little slack (or else I'll go back into posting dormancy in protest) ha ha!



Yesterday afternoon I had the girls down for naps and was happily wasting away my life on Facebook when there came a knock on my door. It was my mother. She had come to help me (i.e. forcibly motivate me to) start cleaning out the men's room.

Not because we are going to turn it into the wood-paneled library Tim has envisioned all along. No, it's going to be a toy room. It seems as the girls get bigger so do their toys. So this is a project that needs to be done by this Christmas or else all Santa is going to be able to bring them is cloths.

So Mom showed up with a stack of plastic totes and I grabbed some garbage bags and we set to work. Three boxes of tools and various hardware are now on the porch to be transported to a pallet in the new shed. Various pictures are now lying on the dining room table ready to be hung using the hangers I found in a pile. And three sacks of junk were hauled out. That took two hours and seemed to clear about 1/4 of the room's floor space.

You can't really tell from the glare of the window but much of the remaining clutter in the back is our book collection. I'm going to need a few more boxes before I can tackle that (mom heard some where that books shouldn't be stored in plastic totes because it can cause mold). Also, it's not in the picture but off to the left side of the room is stacks and stacks of paint and varnish cans left over. I need to weed through those and deem which ones are still fit to store.

But that is progress.