My family is lucky to have a place in Rockaway Beach, OR. It is a beautiful house built by my husbands parents and his aunt and Uncle...now 20 years ago! Its wonderful. Its large and honestly we are always like...we should move to the beach! The Oregon Coast is better than any I have ever been to! OK...not comparing it to Caribbean...cause lets get real NOTHING could compare itself to there! Through the hustle and the bustle of the year we just do not get to the house as often as we would like. Or shall I say, as often as we did BEFORE kids, life, work etc! It sits right on the ocean and boasts 2 stories, a hot tub, our own personal volleyball court (sand of course!) and you can sit on the patio and just take in the ocean...or you can walk off the patio, through the volleyball court and jump right in! Its fantastic really! Whenever we are home I think wow...I wish we had a little bit of the beach house at home. SO, this year I did just that! Here is what you will need:

I used a tub from Target (you know the next size up from a shoe box!) In the bag are shells we bought from Flamingo Jim's (EVERYONE knows of Flamingo Jim's!) and then I found these really awesome aquatic animals kit at Joannes! They are made in tubes too!

First off we took our container to the cleanest area of sand we could find (you could buy sand at Home Depot or Lowe's as well!)

Once we filled the container about a 1/4 of the way full (remember sand and shells will get heavy!) we then used a sand toy and sifted out small particles to get our sand as clean as possible (pieces of wood etc)