DIY Built in Dog House

"LILY"

DIY BUILT IN DOG HOUSE

Everyone loves to spoil there pets!

From the first time we met Lily we fell in love. She is now one of the family and a best friend.

So we decided to create a place for her to call her own!

Most older houses are very poorly designed. Our house doesn't even have normal closets in the bedrooms. Let's just say we don't have a ton of extra space to keep a dog crate for our four legged friend. When we first moved in we started using this closet (see pics below) as our place to put our garbage can, broom, mop, etc. The closet only had a 1 ft door. Not the easiest place to get in to and it was such a hassle to open up the door every time we needed to throw something away. 

So we decided to use the space under the stairs to create a built in dog house.

Here is the inspiration for this project.

http://www.therodimels.com/project-under-staircase-dog-house/

(luckily our house already had the closet under the stairs)

The project took us about a week to complete. Both Sam and I have never done a construction project like this before so it was a trial and error process as to how to make everything work out.  We also built a wine rack for the opening in the kitchen! Much better than the boring door.

Enjoy!

Before the demolition

The beautiful door I got from Hobby Lobby on clearance for $20. It's actually a wall art but we put hinges on it and a lock so we could use it as a door.

The inside of our walls. Yes that is chicken wire and what we think is concrete... Not the easiest thing to cut through.

We made a ceiling for the dog house using plywood and got a cheap recessed light from Menards for about $6.

Sam loved being sparky for the day and hooking up the electrical! We wired it to a dimmer switch so we can adjust the lighting.

Sam started on the wine rack while I did some painting.

Looking good so far. Never thought putting a cabinet into an existing opening would be so difficult. Nothing in our house is level or straight!

Door painted white to match the trim.

We had a hard time trying to decide what to put in the opening on the bottom of the cabinet. I saw an idea on Pinterest again that used a radiator cover. So I looked online to see what store carried it. Home depot had 3'x3' aluminum sheet for $32. We only used half on this project.

Now we can still see Lily and she can see us when we are in the kitchen.

Door installed. I am so happy with the way it looks.

Wine rack almost done. Sam is going to put T-molding on the top to hold wine glasses!

Took a lot of work but the end result looks pretty great.