This project started about a year ago. We bought a new BBQ and my son made a dog house out of the box it came in. He sized it to fit his dog mattress and we were quite surprised when the dog decided he loved it. This was fun for a while but soon we grew tired of a taped together cardboard box sitting in our family room. The roof was coming apart and we had started trying to store things on top of it. A cardboard dog house is not a good end table so it was time to design something a bit more practical. This was another exercise in Google Image Search and although I found several I liked I was not quite satisfied with any of them.
I had a bunch of poplar and baltic birch plywood so I wanted something painted. I had recently watched the remake of "Mad About You" and their apartment has some great wood furniture. Their kitchen has a nice blue with butcher block top so I decided I would try something similar. The dimensions were based on the dog mat I found which was 20x30 and the height was based a bit on the width but also based on how high our couch was. I split the height between a solid wood panel and the dowel bars. I wanted it open but I also wanted it to feel cozy. We choose not to have a door because I think our dog would just attempt to chew his way out and that wasn't really the goal anyways. The hardest element was that I wanted to use spray paint because of the dowel bars. Most spray paint I could find was more in the primary colour family but I eventually found a 'Chalk' spray paint called 'Coastal Blue'. I originally wanted to go with quarter-sawn white oak for the top but I was on a bit of a deadline and didn't have time to get to the wood yard so I had to settle for quarter sawn fir from my local Windsor Plywood. The top is finished with Minwax Wipe on Poly. The dog loves it.
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