Our totally legit kennel

So the house has a pet door, but the problem is, it's in my roommate Laura's room, which is really a converted garage (complete with washer/dryer hookups and the defunct sprinkler system). So while she used to be down with leaving her door open to let Fury and Rex in and out, we instituted a strict no-puppy-in-Laura's-room clause for good reason.

I am neurotic about not letting the kids eat my stuff. I have learned many, many times. They are pretty good (though Rippa is skilled at getting my underswear), but one must not leave things to chance. 

So I bought a used kennel on craigslist for $100. We just had to come and haul it away.

This seems easy, but it's not. The kennel is pretty huge - 6 x 6 x 10 feet. Yishai and I showed up in his big truck with a trailer borrowed from a friend and tried to lash it onto the trailer to make it home from Santa Maria (33 miles) on the highway. Intact.

I thought we did a nice job, but failed to take into account the physics of the kennel, which is that with wind and bumping, the metal will bend and then drag on the highway, causing people to wave frantically and tell us to pull over.

Which we did, sitting there, looking at a bent-up kennel. We're not five miles out of town. We pull it up higher so it can't do that and lash it even tighter. And we're driving along the highway nervous as hell about this. And then suddenly, we get the frantic waving, about five miles later.

So we pull over again. The truck and trailer are so bomb that we are totally unaware that the kennel has collapsed again and has been dragging long enough to MELT the metal. So we pull off the highway in Nipomo and set to taking it apart. All we have is a socket set and a screw driver. Three hours later, the sun is setting, but we have a loaded up kennel. It's kind of funny - these are the sorts of adventures I have with Yishai.

So it has been sitting in our side yard waiting for me to get time to tackle the project. Rippa's discover of a hole in our fence that I have not been able to figure out how to fix without replacing the whole panel made me find time. So, my friend Eric Varley (aka "Pig") came over and helped me figure out the engineering behind it.

And then we were short on brackets. Which no hardware store in town carried. So I ordered them on the Internet.

And then they finally came. I finished building it up and Yishai came over to use his strong male muscles to stretch the chain link into position and now, tada, we have a kennel:

Replete with the previous occupant's ghetto name plate that I need to cut off. That's my roommate Casper in the back, fooling with his woodpile for our Santa Maria style BBQ tonight. Fury and Daca have themselves a nice little dogloo and a trough which Daca likes to spend all day in. Water and cooling! Wee. I am going to put up a tarp at an angle so it makes it rain proof, too. 

I now very happily have a way to contain all three dogs without worrying about escaping. This is also handy because Yishai and I sometimes need to go away together and taking all three is a major hassle. Now I can have the roommates or saintly friends take care of them hassle free. Fury will eventually work out she can dig under it, and so I plan on installing some rocks along the edges (last year I installed a rock patio to help protect the dirt that never regrew the grass - and the grass is grown so I can remove the rocks and find a new home for them). Maybe I'll get another free craigslist dogloo.

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