it's not always 8 months... actually, it's not always sandbox, just sometimes (only google knows when, but I suspect that niches that are too competitive, or too profitable, or both, see the most sandboxes).
And it makes no difference what you do with the domain since you can't rank the site anyway while in sandbox. You can let it sit unused, or work on it, the result will be the same if you're sandboxed (you won't see any google rankings or traffic)