A Dog House Part 2: Construction Begins

Since we are building a small home, we started in the logical place – the foundation.  Thankfully we have a cement slab in the back yard so we’re locating the house on that.  I say thankfully, because that means we can build a simple foundation of just 2 x 6s and apply primer to protect the wood from water.

Foundation of 2" x 6" boards

There are some products specifically made to protect exterior wood from water but we’re trying to do this project on the cheap and opted for the protection of paint instead.  Hopefully we won’t regret this decision in 20 years.

Performing all the cuts, pocket holes, and painting for the foundation took us a whole Saturday so that ended Phase 2 of the Dog House Build.  But that little phase makes for a short, and boring blog so let’s time travel to the following Saturday where Phase 3 began, the exterior walls go up!

Here is where we began to frequently consult our building plans and we even performed some basic geometry to calculate the angle of the sloped roof. (See younger selves! Geometry WILL be useful in real life!)  We opted to use 3/4” plywood for the floor and walls since that thickness will not easily warp or bow.  

Plywood comes in all levels of “niceness” in appearance that correlates with the amount of money each piece costs ($17 - >$50 each).  We chose to save a bit of moolah and use the cheap (big chunks of wood glued together) plywood for the unseen floor and back wall.  Mr. DIY desired a smoother, polished look for the parts of the dog house that are seen, so we purchased mid-level plywood w/ a veneer finish for the front and side exterior walls.

Full sheets of plywood are a bear to grapple across our table saw, so we opted to make most of these cuts on our driveway with the circular saw.  I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of this part but it was boring anyway.

Exterior walls are up!

After making all the cuts, we dry assembled the walls (fitting them together without glue or nails) to make sure our drawn plans actually created the dog house we had envisioned.  Good news is they did! After confirming it looked like we wanted,  we used our handy-dandy pneumatic nailer to put all the pieces up.

You can see here the assembled and primered exterior of the dog house. What you may or may not notice are the 2 x 2s that we included as supportive elements to the integrity of the house.  The 2 x 2 across the middle of the roof is in place for roof support, but we realized later in the project that we really should have saved that piece for much later.

2 types of plywood

Next up, in goes the insulation and on goes the deck!

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!

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!