A year later, I finally made some time to upgrade the dog run I built just under a year ago. So some backgound, the house I live in doesn't really have an easy way to access the backyard, but does have a rooftop patio, so a dog run with irrigation that drains directly into the city's sewage system was an ideal solution. Anyways, I am writing this so that my learnings can serve as inspiration for anyone else that might want to try their hand at building their own. You'll find a short description of 1.0, followed by some changes I made in 2.0, a meterials list, and a few pictures below.
The 1.0 design was fairly basic and consisted of the following:
- A base box using pressure treated lumber because the dog run is outdoors and exposed to the elements.
- A base board with two layers of plastic on top that acted as waterproofing.
- A cut 2" pipe which the slanted base board slopes into in order to catch and direct waste water to the main rooftop drainage.
- Astro turf made for dogs (better drainange vs regular) that sat on top a flexible plastic fence that was raised above the base board.
2.0 design improves on 1.0 in the following ways:
- Larger, and designed around standard material dimensions. Astro turf comes in 12' rolls, of which a buyer determines the width to be cut to, and wooden planks come in 5' an 10' variants. So in order to reduce how much cutting I had to do, I built something close to 10'x 5'.
- Instead of a hidden 2" pipe which wasn't easy to cut and also didn't provide the volume of drainage I would have liked, I instead moved to using a standard rooftop gutter and gutter skirt. The gutter is exposed at the end of the dog run, but this was actually nice because it made it very easy to rinse.
- The plastic that laid on top of the base board was probably the biggest improvement I made as in the 1.0 design flow was impeded because the astro turf was not raised enough and it was hard to get a perfect water tight seal witht the layered plastic sheets. In 2.0 I moved towards using PVC roofing material which was a huge improvement for two reasons: 1. the plastic was much thicker and easier to work with. 2. the plastic was not flat but rather wavy in pattern which meant the peaks would raise and support the astro turf, and the valleys would allow for unimpeded drainage to the gutter. An added benefit was that the plastic came in 10' lengths, which meant I was able to use them as is without cutting.
- One thing that I bought, and ended up no needing was a bag of rocks. I had initally thought that I neede some rocks to further support the astro turf , while also providing drainage, but it turns out the peaks in the roofing plastic, which were spaced about 1" or so apart was entirely sufficient.
Materials:
- pressure treated lumber
- drywall panel
- deck nails
- silicone sealant
- dog friendly astro turf
- roof gutter
- gutter skirt
- pvc roof panel
tl;dr:
- materials
- foundation
-
almost there
- donesies
