We've been working on this big gardening project for weeks now, digging up all of the stones in the flower beds and replacing them with mulch. When we first started the project, we were pulling out the stones by hand, which was a labor-intensive process, to say the least. I researched sifter options, but oddly enough, they don't sell them at your local big-box hardware store. My dad said he had all the materials to make one, but the problem is that he's so busy that many projects get pushed off to that future, misty occasion when he doesn't have anything more pressing to do. I ordered a sifter from eBay, and it worked fine, but it was small. It took ten long hours of sifting and digging just to get five or six feet of the flower bed ready for the mulch. (In my defense, I also had to work around and dig up a giant and incredibly tenacious yew stump!)
Luckily for us, Mike has really discovered his handy side in the last couple of months, and he built a sifting machine. Basically, it's a box with a screen on the bottom that slides along a frame, keeping the rocks up top while the sifted dirt falls into a neat pile below. It's a lot more physically demanding than my little hand-sifter was, but it gets the job done a lot more quickly. So take a moment here to admire Mike's ingenuity and creative building skills. Woo hoo! At this rate, we may actually have the project finished before we get our mortgage paid off (in 29 more years).
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