Dog House, Part 2: Sheathing

I followed Mike Strong's direction in using 3/8" plywood for the sheathing. While this keeps the budget lower (well, actually, the plywood ended up being free, but more on that some other time), I might bump up the thickness if I were doing this again. The upshot of the thinner plywood is that it is easy for me to handle. The downside is that it does seem to split and crack more than I expected it to.

Once again, I relied on someone else's tools to do the big cuts. I asked the guy at the store to cut 2 sheets across the grain at 35 inches, twice. This is because I wasn't positive of the final dimensions of the walls but I knew that all the walls would be 35 inches tall. Once he did those cuts, it left me with 4 sheets that were 35x48 and 2 sheets that were 26x48 (although, for you perfectionists, the saw kerf from the first two cuts would shave a quarter-inch off the end piece, so the 26 inches is probably closer to 25-3/4, but again - this is carpentry not woodworking).

I took all these little, manageable sheets into the basement (it was raining, so I didn't want to bring the saw outside and run the extension cord through the water) to cut them to the final size on the table saw.
Confession: I am terrified of the table saw. I have had it for over a year and moved it 3 times and still have never turned it on. Once I saw how big the sheets were in proportion to the table, I decided to use the table saw as a cutting platform and cut with my little circular saw. I am sure my dad will be thrilled to know that the saw he bought me is actually just a very expensive set of sawhorses. Also, Melanie: do not tell your dad about this. He'd be just as disgusted with me, I think.

The nice thing about the table saw over actual sawhorses is that it has these adjustable wings, so I actually had nice support for my workpiece and my waste piece, which is what you want for safety's sake. You can see below how the board spans the table wing and so there is a nice cutting path. I didn't take pics of this, but I clamped the boards down because the table is made smooth for boards to glide across, so they were shifting a lot while I was getting set up for the for the cut.

I measured each side of the frame with the plan to have the front board overlap each side by the thickness of the board (3/8") and to have the sides overlap the back by 3/8". It turns out that I can't cut right, because the sheet for the back wall is completely out of square and looked like a parallelogram. My side sheets turned out great - they were spot-on what I was shooting for. The front sheet is its own little problem which I explain below. After all that measuring, I saw a dog house that is trimmed out on the corners and I want to do that, so I could have just cut each piece to the exact dimensions of the frame, but oh well, it was good practice for me to work through that overlap problem.

About that front piece. I had a measurement for the opening based on a measurement of the dog, but when I actually cut it out, it just looked...wrong. Seriously, I double-checked the original instructions and I did it right, but it looks really weird. (If Heidi reads this, she will be thinking "FebRuary?!?" right now).
Next time: pics of the finished "box," and I start on framing the roof.