If you didn’t know already… My wife and I LOVE to build stuff. We’ve been collecting more and more left over material from various projects, and we have this one corner we just lean things in. (Like long pieces of pipe, steel, 2×4′s, etc…)
In a quest to reclaim some more space I built this quick vertical material rack. Made entirely out of scrap, It took about 15 minutes, and cleaned up “the corner” immensely. It is composed of 2 7″ pieces of 2×4 and one old piece of something… (We found it in the house when we moved in ).
UPDATE: This was a fun project, but it didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. It was very difficult to build a door that seals well. We ended up buying a large dog door from Home Depot and putting it in instead. The Ikea Bag Door did get us by for a few months, but I would recommend just biting the bullet and buying a proper dog door. And, cutting through your door with a saw… Very empowering… (END UPDATE)
So… We got our latest bill from SRP (our electric utility company), and it was $460… An increase of $300 over last month. Needless to say, we were a little shocked.
One thing we have been doing, is leaving the pool room open to the house, and the outside door to the pool room open to the backyard, this way the dogs can move in and out. But it really hasn’t been very good. Insects fly inside, and cool air definitly escapes. I thought the pool room was acting kind of as a buffer… And it is, but not enough.
Enter the dog door… Do you know how expensive dog doors are? Not cheap. Especially for big dogs. They are fairly simple, so we decided to build one. Step 1, cut a hole in the door. We measured from about 6″ off the ground, 1″ wider then our biggest dogs max width, and about 4″ taller that the largest dogs back. This will allow them to easily move in and out. I first tried to cut the hole with the door in place, but it just wasn’t working out. So we removed the door, placed it on some lawn furniture and finished the cutting. After using the skill saw on both sides, we used a jig saw to quickly square the corners and finish up.
Once the hole was cut, I filed off the edges to make sure there were no sharp edges. Then, we re-hung the door, and made a temporary flap. The flap consists of two layers of tarp cut from used Ikea bags, weight at the bottom with a piece of steel. We will most likely place a piece of wood over the door at night to keep the bugs out.
After some brief coaxing, our dogs quickly began using the dog door, and now move in and out at their own will without us keeping the pool room open. Yay!
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