The Blackfords, of Spencer Estates: Dog House

There are plenty of places on the Internets where you can learn the proper way to build a dog house. I’m going to provide some links to those because they were very helpful, to me.

This is the only place you’ll be able to see that it really is possible for pretty much anyone to build a dog house in the span of a few days and 23 trips to the hardware store.

Project notes:

1) This house is going to sit on a pallet ("skid"), so I didn't build a floor. That created its own challenges in terms of framing up the walls, because there was no floor to nail them to.

2) I looked at this guy's great project notes, and I settled on using one of many formulas from this great site because Magnus is way smaller than Ranum's hounds.

3) Don't get the idea that, just because HGTV always shows some cute chick with perky breasts running around in a sweater and trousers that you should do this, too. You will get dirt on your pants and sweat in your sweater, and your boobs will fall out of your bra no less than 27 times before you finally give up and put on your sports bra and ratty t-shirt. OK, let's get started.

The first thing you should do is sketch something like what you want to build to take with you to the lumberyard. You should discuss this with the person in detail because you will almost certainly have forgotten to factor in a board dimension somewhere and that person will catch it on your cutting diagram and correct it, saving you time and aggravation.

I don't have a chop saw and my circular saw is cordless, so to preserve my sanity, I had the lumberyard cut the boards while I was having breakfast with a friend. Then I could put them together, almost like a little kit. I love kits! This is the advantage of using your local lumberyard over the big-box guys. Please do not comment on my figure in the shadow in the picture.

I thought I would at least attempt to toenail something, and you can see in the pic below the blowout I created on my first joint. This part was really frustrating and I ended up having to call my dad and ask him how to get started.

He had a lot of crazy "suggestions" about doghouses in general and it took about 40 minutes to get through all those to get to the answer I wanted about how to nail the 2x4s together at the corners. It turns out that it's easier to build each wall separately and then nail all the walls together, but I also decided to skip the toenailing and use the brackets, which I'll explain when we get to that part.

Now, my dad says that the way you build a wall is to mark the board that will be the base of the wall, start your nails on your marks, and drive the nails until they just stick out of the other side of the board, then line up your studs and nail the board into the studs.

Couple of things to note: 1) you have to stand on the stud while you nail so you use your weight to hold the boards in place; and 2) this assumes two facts about your work area, neither of which are true in my case: that it is roughly flat and roughly level. Because this is a doghouse, I wasn't too worried if things weren't perfectly flush, which you can see in the pic below. If you care about that kind of thing and want to know what to do to make them line up perfectly, you will have to ask someone who knows, because I do not.

Before I went any further, I wanted to test the whole concept for size. I realised too late that I could have made a mock-up using cardboard, but in this case, it looks like things are going to be OK. The hardest part of all of this project was getting him to actually go in between those wall frames and just sit while I took this pic.

Looks good. Well, truthfully, it still looks too tall to me, but I'm going to trust in the power of the formula.

Once your walls are built, you can lay them out like this and have an old-fashioned wall-raising party. You just need to round up a bunch of squirrels to lift the walls and "walk" them into place, like an Amish barn raising or something. Or, you could just do it yourself because the walls aren't too heavy yet.

Now, when you get to the part where you start attaching walls to other walls, I highly recommend using the brackets I mentioned, and I will warn you so you aren't surprised like I was that while the brackets are a buck or two each, you also end up having to buy a $10 box of specialty screws to go with the brackets. The screws are sized for the openings in the brackets, and they are self-drilling, which means each one has a tiny drill bit on the tip of it (you can kind-of see in the picture below). The threads are made for digging into wood and the head is designed to hold the metal and spread out the load. Believe me when I say that I looked at all the other screws in the store to see if I could find a cheaper substitute. You can, but nothing does all the jobs that these little guys will. So now you know.

I used the larger braces for the bottom of the frame, and then used the smaller kind to brace the top part of the frame. This saved me 4 dollars and a ton of extra screws. By the way, you can see above that I didn't have all the screws in the bracket when I took the picture. I thought about leaving it like that because there were so many places for screws that I thought surely some of them were overkill, and they probably are for a dog house. But the frame was a little wobbly and it seemed like putting the rest of the screws in stiffened things up a bit, so you decide for yourself how you want to do that part. Also, I hope that my eighth-grade IA teacher Mr. Dagger does not stumble across this blog, but if so - Larry, I realise now based on the hammer tracks below that the "C" you gave me was well-deserved and I am no longer bitter. Much.

2x4s and such ("Framing lumber") are pretty prone to warping and bowing, so you have to do a lot of pushing, pulling, and grunting while you connect the parts. Even still, things don't line up perfectly. This is one of the big differences between carpentry and woodworking. I prefer the latter, but hey - the dog needs a house.