!44: Dog Kennel Plans - Ready Made Or Build it Yourself?

!±8± Dog Kennel Plans - Ready Made Or Build it Yourself?

Our daughter has been nagging us or some months now about having a dog as a pet. She likes animals, and anyway, lots of her school friends have pet dogs so why shouldn't she have one? As a parent, you probably know this is the question which finally seals the deal in the kids eyes. From that point, you have to go and get yourself a dog as a pet.

Well, we eventually gave in to this pester power,as you do. The one condition my wife gave us was that the animal had to be housed outside. My wife rightly argued that she was unwilling to risk having damage to furniture and carpets by an as yet untrained dog. However, that might change in the future once the animal is house trained.

But for now, he lives outside. At this point I had not made up my mind whether to buy a dog kennel from the store or try and build one myself. After some preliminary research into cost of the ready made, compared with self build, I decided to build one myself. By doing this I found I could save money and have the dog kennel I wanted versus a best fit version from the store.

I had no idea about what design to have, or what type of wood I should use. I have seen dog kennels before, both the real thing, and in photographs as well. My common sense told me I would need to treat the wood in order to protect it long term against rotting.

That is of course, if it was not already pre-treated when I bought the wood. On the other hand, I would not be able to use anything likely to injure or harm the animal. And, it would need to be big enough for the animal to get into and move around, both now and when she grows bigger. I didn't realize, until I sat down and thought about the project, how much detail there is in the seemingly simple construction of a dog kennel.

My next action was to acquire some dog kennel plans so I could decide which one I liked best. This was going to be custom built for this one dog, so I read up on the breed of dog, and used this knowledge in deciding the design I wanted. Building a dog kennel was no different from any other woodworking project, and I found it much easier following step by step instructions.