soultoad, posts by tag: viggo - LiveJournal

From an idea I had last winter, through a lot of work and expense, to the celebration last night, the Dog Mansions have been a real adventure. It's funny to think that, at the beginning, we thought four of the five houses would be exactly alike, and now each one is different even though their size (except for the Redheads' house) is similar.

Yesterday was a lot more work than it seemed like it should have been. I'm rather beat up today - I fell on a concrete block while trying to drag a big patio umbrella out of Kalija and Patty's pen (it never made it out), Oril jumped on me and ripped up my arm, I screwed my finger instead of the screw, and I have bruises and cuts on both arms and hands that I can't remember how I got - plus, I fell again today and cut my leg, so I'm sure I'm going to be very sore tomorrow, I'm already feeling it tonight. But there were three houses to finish, so we got to work around 2:30 and finished around 8:30. We made two big changes to our proposed work: we did the food bowls differently in the Redheads' house, and all my nagging about Kalija and Patty's floor being too high resulted in a surprise step, which I had also mentioned several times. :)

So I took pictures today! ( Collapse )

Today we lowered the floor, which I'm amazed about since I couldn't imagine how to do it other than taking it apart completely and re-doing the whole thing. Nope, it was complicated but not that bad. And now the floor is the correct height. We also put the sides on, put the hay in, and nailed the roof. We have to get one more piece of roofing, we didn't buy enough to overlap the pieces properly but that's pretty much all that's left to do. Well, that's not true...we still have to set a center post and build the food shelves. These mansions always take longer to do than it would seem. :)

But these pictures give an idea of what a real mansion the Redheads have...( Collapse )

We worked for EIGHT hours yesterday, trying to get the Redheads' mansion built. At one point, we were calling it a chateau because it's huge compared to the others. It has to be since it's for 3 dogs instead of 2, but it still looks really big, and it's a lot more work. We aren't done, and plan to work on it some more today. We actually have to lower the floor because it's too high. We're hoping to get that done and get the sides on today, but we won't finish everything today, it's such a big job.

I had finished the Cat Dome Friday, but the IBKs disappeared right before I was going to put them in it, so it didn't get used. The Redheads went to the creek, but were causing a ruckus with the back yard dogs, so I ended up putting them in the big catchpen for most of the day. They weren't happy about it but at least everyone was safe.

And a few pictures...( Collapse )

I'm just posting all that I got. They wouldn't stay still, so I hardly got any good ones of Viggo...Orli, on the other hand, likes to pose. :) ( Collapse )