The New Gilbert Woodshop

My buddy Jonathan is slowly becoming Norm Abrams. He outfits his house with wainscoting, custom paneling, plinths, and other fancy woodworking terms I can barely pronounce.

He has time to do all this because he has no children. Yet. He will soon learn. ;)

Around here, we go for projects that are a bit more redneck wood.

The kid's playground was looking a little worse for wear, what with all the Arizona sun and yard sprinklers. So I first made a few improvements, moving the picnic table under the slide, and building a sandbox underneath.

The sandbox is approximately 2.5 times the square footage of their previous sandbox, which will hopefully reduce the turf fights by an equivalent factor. More importantly, the new sandbox is approximately 5.7 times further from the back door to the house, which will hopefully reduce the high sandbox to house sand transfer ratio that currently occurs around here.

Although little boy pockets still are highly effective sand transfer mechanisms.

All things one need not consider when building plinths and wainscoting. Good luck buddy! ;)

The climber also needed a fresh coat of some kind of wood protectant. Given the various surfaces, it is a pain to paint. We tried rollers once, and it took forever. I used a pesticide sprayer filled with Thompson's water sealer once. Fairly effective, but my wife also complained that it was covered in sticky half dried drips of water sealer for months because I over applied.

So I figured this was an appropriate excuse to purchase a fairly cheap paint sprayer. And since it touted that the dual nozzle design "minimized overspray" I figured I was golden.

"Minimized", however, does not mean "none."

It also doesn't help when someone get excited about his new toy, and decides that nearing dark would be an excellent time to test out the sprayer. Apparently I also got some overspray on all of Luke's new sandbox toys. And his brothers. Not his brother's, possessive nouns. His brothers, the direct objects.

So a few days later I could be found scrubbing overspray off of all of the bars of the climber.

I still haven't gotten to the toys, as my wife keeps reminding me. The boys cleaned up just fine, however.

And the playground turned out rather nicely refurbished, overspray and all.

And on the theory that there is no such thing as too much sand, I hauled in about another 800 pounds of the stuff.

Just to make sure a sufficient quantity makes it into the house...