Bucket Ashtray for Guests

Going to be a little off topic again today, but we had a get together with some of my girlfriends this past Friday, everyone brought a desert and we had coffee to go along with it.  Now onto the ashtray dilemma:

A few of my friends that came over Friday are smokers; they know it's unhealthy, so I’m not going to lecture them about it.  Besides, I don’t really feel like I have that much room to talk since I used partake in that nasty habit. 

But I have been running into a slight problem, that since I do not smoke, my friends will excuse themselves to go outside when a craving hits.  Which I thank them for profusely. 

What I do not thank them for are the cigarette butts that were littering my yard.  Yuck!  I quit smoking so I do not want to have to go through my yard individually picking up each and every butt from someone else’s smoking addiction. (That and getting the smell of cigarettes on my fingers makes me start craving one, which is never a good thing. Must have willpower.)

But I have now found a way to solve my little dilemma.  I had a galvanized pail that a friend gave me (she’d ordered several of these metal buckets for centerpieces for her reception, and had some extra left over).  So I looked online to see what all needed to go into an outdoor ashtray.  For the most part you just fill the bucket within an inch of the top rim with sand and set it in a spot where the smoker’s will notice and use it. 

Some people put a few handfuls of charcoal into the bucket before pouring the sand, it is said to cut down on the smell, but since my bucket is outside I’m really not that worried about it.

To clean it out you can just use a kitty litter scoop or if you have an old deep fryer scoop it works too (I had ordered a few extras when I kept losing my original, I found it, so now its my cigarette butt scoop).