Dog Run

        As you now know, we have two dogs which basically means that our backyard STINKS! Our backyard was one of the things we loved about this house, with all the trees around and English Ivy everywhere it felt like our own secret garden.  But it didn’t take long before our two dogs made it a waste land, literally. Shortly after, I decided we needed to do something about that. We first started with trying to pick up after them on a regular basis. I hated putting a plastic bag in the trash can for such a small thing, and it still seemed like it was so hard to find in our backyard. Not to mention that they both urinated right when they got out the back door so it smelled from that too. I would often think about putting a dog run in the back corner of our backyard (see exhibit A in picture) so that when I went out there I wouldn’t have to smell their business we could go outside and enjoy our backyard. The cost of fencing in a decent size dog run was way too much, and I wasn’t sure what my neighbors would think since it would be right next to their nice grilling area (drawing does not accurately represent their awesome grill).  Thankfully one day it hit me, we can pull up all the bricks on the side of the house and put a dog run in over there! It was a way better spot (see exhibit B in picture.  Even though a good section of the brick patio looked amazing we never saw ourselves hanging out over there because of the street noise (we live on a pretty busy road). The neighbor on this side of us doesn’t have much access to this side of her house because of her AC unit, so it shouldn’t be a bother to her. We decided that we could just make a gate from the house to the current fence which would be way less material therefore cost less. 

With this in mind we even went ahead and bought a gardenia and two honey suckle plants for our flowerbed right in front of this area to help with the smell (I can’t wait for these plants to start smelling good) from our indentured servant while she was still working at a home improvement store.  We also set to work on pulling up all the bricks. We would work at it for a couple of hours until we got bored, eaten up by mosquitos, and/or too tired to continue. This went on for days. I was lucky enough to have one of my little brothers come visit me for a week and he really wanted to do a project, so I set him to work on pulling up bricks. He quickly got tired, so it was left for us to finish another day.

Then one day I was using StumbleUpon and came across a website that was talking about how to make your own dog compost so I decided that would be our weekend project (and yes this was like a Thurs or Fri).  We actually finished that project in one weekend, although, I want to replace the plastic trash can lid with a wooden lid. About a month later we got the gate done in just two days.  On Friday I decided to switch from my current project of scrapping paint off a door to putting out pine straw just to have Drizzt decide he wanted to kick it all into one corner.

What is left to do:

Figure out what to do with all the bricks (front walkway, what else?)

Move the bricks

Lay down the rest of the pine straw

Replace plastic lid to dog compost

Stain gate?