Step2 Sand and Water Transportation Station Review

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(More customer reviews)There are two major issues with the sand and water table - 1) cover is not waterproof, and 2) the sand doesn't play nice with the accessories - they don't really work because the sand clogs up the gears.
I'll go through my experience with the sand and water table in order of events. If you don't want to read all of it, the gist is: I like it, but a plain raised sand table would be an upgrade.
Before I went out to get sand, it just had water in it. That was pretty good - the boats floated in it, the water worked well with the spinning wheel and other accessories. My son wasn't that interested in it, though. So I put some rice in it, and that went over well, but I wasn't interested in cleaning up spilled/wet rice and I wanted it outdoors. So I went to a hardware store and found a bag of sandbox sand. The sandbox sand was basically gravel. It was too big for the holes in the funnels, and scratched up the plastic. Because the cover isn't waterproof - it got wet, and when it got wet it was a muddy mess. Which is my fault for not knowing the difference between play sand and sandbox sand. Anyway it was a wet mess. It wasn't drying out on its own so I dumped out most of the puddle and tried to dry the sand out by keeping it in the sun and turning over the sand. I "played" in the sandbox a lot more than my son ever did, so it sat unused until the next spring.
So I took out the gravel, cleaned all the leftover dirt out, and found some play sand... which is about as fine grained as salt. Put the new sand in, sewed vinyl to the underside of the cover (with a gap in the seam to allow excess water to drain over the side... this works so-so. Well, the play sand is fine enough to go through the holes, and it was really great until the wheels stopped turning. The tipsy thing stopped tipping. The sand was getting into all the crevices and sticking them up. So they don't work. The funnels still work, though, and this way I don't have so much to take apart and store when the table isn't being used (if I don't put it away, it blows away).
I buried some bugs in the sand, and my kid plays in it so much I grab a book before we go out. I think if it was just a sand table - no accessories, not divided up, it would be an improvement.

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