John Muldoon

For the past year and a half, we’ve been looking to move. That’s right, a year and a half. Countless open houses, hunting for property on all the real estate websites, the whole thing. So, we’re picky. The main reason we’re picky is because we love the neighborhood in Oakland where we’ve been living for the past 3 or 4 years, the other big reason is that we have a dog and we wanted to find a place where he can have some outdoor space he can call his own. And a place to do his doggy business. We didn’t want a single family home, either, which made it even harder to find a place with a yard. Anyway, we finally found a place with a big outdoor deck, fully fenced, in our neighborhood. So, he’s happy and we’re happy.

On this deck, we wanted to build our dog, Badger, a special area to call his own, and to answer his call. A Doggy Garden, “Badger’s Garden”. This is the story of its construction.

The idea:

Build a small doggy garden in a tucked away corner of our deck. Some extra criteria were that it (1) had to be complete with yummy-smelling (I’m guessing) grass, (2) self-contained and semi permanent, but without damaging the deck and (3) must be “flush-able”, to keep it looking and smelling fresh, with a drain that didn’t clog and did tap into the building’s rain gutter system without damaging it.

Materials:

A shower pan, a drain assembly, a series of PVC and ABS connectors, 15 feet of hose, 50 lbs of gravel, a roll of “weed barrier” porous plastic, and some sod.

How we did it:

First I must thank my Father for his clever input refining the design ideas, and for his help and companionship from start to finish. In all, from the trip to Home Depot until the project was done, only took 3 or 4 hours. Not bad.

I’ll try to put this in order:

1. Measure twice.
2. Head over to Home Depot to get your materials.
3. Accidentally cut your hand on the sharp edge of the the fiberglass shower pan while loading it into your car in front of Home Depot. Be sure to get some fiberglass shards and lots of mud from the sod in your fresh cut.
4. Wash your hand in a display fountain in the garden section of Home Depot.  Bandage your hand.
5. Back at home, assemble a nice sculpture of connectors and adapters to create a 90 degree bend which reduces from the 2 inch shower drain to a (male) garden hose connector.
6. Unscrew your deck boards and run your hose. We had to soak our hose in hot water to make it malleable and then we molded it to the exact shape we wanted to run it and let it cool in the open air for a few minutes. I’m hoping that will keep it from kinking or clogging.
7. Screw your deck boards back into place.
8. Put your new drain assembly sculpture in the shower pan, put the pan in place and connect the hose.
9. We laid down two layers of that weed barrier stuff right in the pan, cut to fit.
10. Then on top of that we laid out the 50lbs of gravel.
11. Then another layer of that weed barrier plastic stuff. We included these layers because we knew we would be flushing the garden with water and we didn’t want the mud from the sod to clog up our custom plumbing.
12. Then we just cut and laid our sod, which happened to be the perfect width for our shower pan (score!).
13. Job done. Wash up. Have a beer.

So, here’s the photo gallery.  Click through and enjoy.