A Dog Palace Part 1

We are the proud parents of a 2 year old, rescued, female Boxer.  She is our baby and as such we treat

her with as many earthly delights as is healthy.  Along those lines, the weather here is quickly turning to Spring and our little girl would rather spend her days outside on the lawn than inside with the cat. Although we have a large shaded deck I'm not comfortable leaving her out until she has her own shelter in case the weather unexpectedly turns.

So Mr. DIY performed some YouTube research for dog house inspiration and I presented my wish list.  Mr. DIY wanted a modern style house with a window to let in natural light and I wanted a porch and a lift-able roof to easily clean out the inside of the dog house.  We both wanted the inside to be large so we could easily add another dog to our family in the future.  With our combined demands in hand, we drafted the ultimate dog house building plan.

Rough Building Plans

I was completely comfortable not drawing anything out and just winging it as we went but thankfully Mr. DIY persevered because once we got started I can't tell you how many times we referred back to those plans. By the end of the build our plans were completed marked up with additional notes, tweaks, etc, so I recreated the general gist to the right.

We started our measurements by deciding how large to make the overall house.  In order to keep the build simple, we settled on the size of a full sheet of plywood, which is approx. 8' x 4', and scaled the rest of the house from that. For the height we took our boxer's measurements into consideration. Scaling the porch was a bit tricky, but in the end we decided to obey the Fibonacci sequence (aka The Golden Ratio) in order to appeal to our palates for balance.

Fibonacci Spiral

With plans firmly drawn, we then moved forward with creating a supplies list.  This step is essential to avoiding multiple trips to the local box store.  Now we still failed to anticipate a few items but overall we dramatically reduced our number of trips to the store from around 4 to just 2.  Next Post - starting the build.

Thanks for stopping by our neck of the DIY neighborhood. And as our favorite neighbor Mr. Rogers used to say, "You always make each day a special day for me, by just being you. There's only 1 person in this WHOLE world like you; that's you yourself, and people can like you exactly the way you are.  I'll be back next time. Bye-bye!"

Bye-bye neighbor!