How to Make a Natural Children’s Sand Pit

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Outline your children’s sand pit in the proposed size, shape, and location

   You can use a garden hose, string, bricks, rocks, or whatever else you have on hand (you’ll remove these later).
   
   Change any feature desired now, while it’s still in the planning stages.
   
   Some questions to ask yourself as you’re doing this:
   – How many children will be using this sand pit?
   – Is there shade (trees, building structures) or will you want to erect an umbrella or canopy of some sort?
   – Is the sand pit located in an area that will allow the children some degree of privacy and autonomy (more important for older kids than toddlers, obviously) while also allowing for any adult supervision necessary? (Our new sand pit is at the edge of the backyard, where my girls and their friends can talk and play on their own, but where I can see it from the windows and from the yard.)
   – Is there a water source somewhere nearby in case you’d like to bring in a water play element?

2. Start digging!

   It took us the rest of the day to remove the sod (we lay it upside down in an area where I wanted to start a new garden bed) and dig a hole deep enough. We decided that part of our sand pit would be fairly deep and part of it would be shallower, to allow for a variety of ways to play in the sand and rocks.
   
   

3. Line your hole with landscape fabric

   Our landscape fabric was 3 feet wide, and our sand pit was 8 feet by 6 feet, so we lay two pieces of landscape fabric inside the pit along the two longer edges, with a third in the middle overlapping the other two by a good margin. We held the fabric in place temporarily with random rocks and bricks around the edges.
   
   

4. Add your sand!

   My kids were super excited about this step, understandably. I brought the heavy bags of sand over in a wheelbarrow and the kids cut them open and dumped out the sand. 20 bags of it.
   
   And started playing in it immediately! For the rest of the evening…
   
   

5. Line the edge of your sand pit with rocks

   The next morning, we went straight to the stone yard to pick out rocks together to outline the edges of our sand pit.
   
   Once we placed the rocks around the edge, I went back and trimmed away the excess landscape fabric with scissors. And then hid the edges under mulch.
   
   

6. Play!

   The kids (and their friends) have been playing or relaxing in the new sand pit pretty much nonstop since we made it.