Kennel Construction
We have been in our new house for a few weeks now. We love it! It is just perfect, I feel like we live in a park. Unfortunately, with this beautiful house and property has come a lot of work. It is still too wet to put fence posts in, so we have no fences…none! That means a lot of dog walking!
Now that we are fairly settled into the house we are really getting started on the kennels. I thought it would be nice to chronicle the progress of the kennel on the blog. I will update with pictures and progress reports of our kennel construction.
We started with a great building. It is 30X 60 steel building that is completely insulated. It has hydro, water, propane and septic. Also, tall ceilings and ceiling fans. So, what we need to do is set up the indoor kennels, put up walls for the grooming room, do all the indoor plumbing, grade and stone outside and put up the fencing. Doesn’t sound bad if you say it all really fast 
Our indoor runs are modular, so they where fairly easy to set up. Sean just welded some brackets on them so that they could be attached to the floor and walls. We also put up sheets of white plastic behind the kennels. These make the walls easy to clean and also prevent the Akitas from eating the walls (which is something they quite like to do).
The Girls
We have room for more kennels in the future. Right now we have all the girls on one side of the kennel and the boys on the other side. This wasn’t really the initial plan, but all the girls decided to come into season as soon as we moved. The kennel area is very spacious and has kept cool on warm days. There is a large floor drain right in the middle which makes it really easy to hose down.
Boy's runs
We are putting a grooming room down at one end of the building. Although there was water to the building there wasn’t any indoor plumbing. For some reason the previous owners had removed all the pipes, not that there were that many. So we have a set of large stainless sinks we are putting in, a propane hot water heater is coming to be installed and we found a used bath tub on Kijiji for $10! So, Sean has had a quick plumbing lesson and is now in charge of plumbing the whole room…he is such a good sport! I can’t wait for all the construction work to be done so I can start of the asethetic part.
Grooming Room
Outside the water has been a problem. The ground is clay and really holds water, so there is standing water in places we want to put runs. The previous owners had put a trench down the middle of the property to help with drainage to one of the large ditches. Unfortunately, they left the dirt from the trench alongside the trench which created a berm and was stopping some of the water from reaching the trench. We have to remove the berm and then grade down to the trench (which is becoming a ditch, or a little creek as I like to refer to it). This was all going well till our tractor died! However our wonderful new neighbors (who happen to own two Akitas themselves!) came to our rescue. They lent us their larger tractor! It is the one in the picture with Sean on it. Well, then one of the tires blew on the new tractor! So it is Sunday afternoon and we are two tractors down! It was an expensive Monday at the Kubota dealership!
West side of buildingIn this picture which is the west side of the building, you can see the ditch (creek) and the fresh dirt where we have removed the berm and graded. We also moved those cedar trees from beside the building and put down the stone. The dirt we removed from the west side of the building we are using to build up on the east side. It is really low and wet there. On the east side you can also see a make shift run I have put up our of expens for the puppies. East side
