Sand Boat

Kids need a sand box. They say it's for things like fine motor skills and creative play. It's really because kids like to play in the dirt, and sand is cleaner than dirt. It's really like dirt with all of the dirty stuff washed out of it. I approve of sand.
When we bought our house it came with several bonus features. These included a garage full of stuff, traces of glitter on every available indoor surface, eau de cat pee, and two dead boats. The stuff in the garage was useless, even for me. The glitter is still around in trace amounts even after sweeping and painting and replacing almost all of the floors. The cat pee smell was eventually cleaned up. One of the boats went away, but one stayed and became the sand boat.

Everybody loves the Sand Boat.

When I was a kid our sandbox was an old steel row boat. It sat out under the old willow tree and was filled with stolen sand. The sand was allegedly stolen from protected sand dunes by shoveling it in the side door of a VW bus. I don't think the dunes ever missed it and we enjoyed it much more as kids than the dunes ever did. The old rowboat didn't require any conversion to a sandbox. It was just dragged into place and filled with sand. That's the advantage of a flat bottomed boat. The boat we had to work with was a 15 foot fiberglass runabout with a fairly deep hull. I had two choices. I could have dug a hole to sink the boat in the lawn, or I could cut the bottom of the boat off to make it rest flat on the ground. I chose option two, mostly because I got to cut up a boat with a sawzall, which was pretty fun. A little measuring and cutting and figuring and cutting a little more to make it better and we had a boat that looked like it was 'floating' on the lawn. We carried it over to one of the abandoned cement slabs that our property so wonderfully contains and set it down. A little fiberglass work to seal up some holes and a new paint job and it was ready for sand. This time the sand was purchased, mostly because there aren't any sand dunes nearby to steal it from. We filled it up and have had quite a few years of sand box playing.
I'm hoping that through some quirk of fate, one of my own children can someday find an old dead boat to turn into a sandbox for their children. It's quite likely that we could become the first three generation sand boat family.