Allen / UKC
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Registered: Nov 2004
Location: Michigan
Posts: 9282 |
The inside feed room area is nice but if I had something like that I would go to a set up that I stole from a bear hunter in Wisconsin 25 years ago. I had mine set up like it before I moved to Michigan and loved it! Best interior set up I ever had.
My brother's kennel, although permanent and twice as wide, is set up much like the one in the photo. That interior set-up is great until you have a dog that craps all over and makes an annoying mess of things. Especially, with males that want to mark their space and piss all over the side panels between pens. The bear hunters set-up eliminated all that. Never had a problem, plus feeding and watering was clean, efficient and never inside their pen to drag around to spill etc..
In a nutshell..... build your interior with nothing much deeper and or wider than the length and width of the dog. Same with height. Put a hinged lid on the top of your sleeping box for easy access to clean etc.. Actually, the whole box (sleeping box and the part where the dog comes into from outside) is all one free-standing piece. I also mounted a hinge lock on each side of your box to attach it to the interior wall to keep it in place. This also allows for easy de-taching for periodic cleaning purposes inside your building as needed.
On the face (between the feed room and your box) have a slider door that slides up/down and out, if you want to remove or replace it. Get to more on that in a sec. In that slider panel, make a hole big enough for the dog to stick his head through, into the feed room area to get access to its feed and water.
For feed and water, I built a 2x4 type frame 12 or so inches high and wide enough to snuggly fit two square bowls next to each other. One for water and one for feed. The bowls I used are the plastic square kind (generally green, blue, or red) carried by Farm Stores such as TSC. The kind that has a hanger on the one side to hang over a 2x4, made for feeding goats, calves, and smaller animals.
The reason for having this little free-standing water and feed box base is two-fold. I found that because of the height of the hole in your door panel, setting your feed and water bowls on the floor (inside the feed room) was sometimes a little too low for the dog to reach it comfortably. Secondly and most importantly, the framed box keeps the dog from pushing the bowls around and potentially out of reach of the dog. If needed, you could add a quick snap to attach it to the door panel to keep it in place, but I never had any problem without it. It also allows you to easily pull it back out of reach of the dog to fill at feeding time etc..
As for the hole sizes, I found that it worked best to have a hole size that is a unique fit for the dogs head to comfortably slip through. Obviously, for smaller dogs or puppies you'd want a smaller hole size. Therefore, I had some extra door panels that could be replaced depending on the size of dog in that kennel. The one thing that always concerned me was; dogs chewing around that hole (door panel was 1'2" plywood material). I had 8 separate individuals kennels and not one of them ever bothered chewing around those holes to where I had to replace the door panels. The bear hunter must have been right when he stressed that the correct hole size would generally eliminate that problem.
This set up actually gives you more inside space for storage on top of the entrance/exit part of the interior box as well as open space between each separate kennel. What it amounts to basically is the dog has no extra room other than to come in, hang a left to get in its sleeping quarters, or come straight in and put its head through the door panel hole for feeding purposes. As you know with a truck box, a dog doesn't need much width room to be able to turn around in close quarters.
As for getting the dog in and out of its kennel, I had two access doors. One on the outside (kennel fenced door) in each individual kennel and one inside where you could slide the door panel all the way up to the let the dog in or out. Loved it and would use this set up again for the interior of any interior/exterior type kennel set up.
I'm sure this set up is nothing new to those who've been around for a while but something for the young bucks to consider for this type of set up. When the dogs aren't crapping and pissing on the inside it sure helps with keeping some of the odor down as well.
Last edited by Allen / UKC on 01-12-2018 at 11:44 PM
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01-12-2018 04:57 PM
