No, we are not barking up the wrong tree with this story (and, yes, that's just the first of a whole bunch of really bad wordplay you'll find in the next handful of pages).
Frankly, we think doghouses are right at home in This Old House. From our point of view, the five canine cribs that follow make perfect sense given the love affair that most Americans — and certainly our readers — have with their pets. But we also think these doggie domiciles are a pretty good way of putting the fine-craftsmanship cornerstone of TOH on display.
Our dog's-eye view takes in centuries' worth of classic house styles, from a stately brick Georgian to a storybook Craftsman cottage. Not least of all, it makes sense because doghouses figure in so many of our earliest memories—and we don't just mean the ones involving a certain biplane-flying beagle. A lot of those memories involve
some fledgling attempts at carpentry.
Somewhere between bending nails with a choked-up grip on the hammer (age 2, say) and building a secret fort with scavenged scraps (perhaps age 12), there was the doghouse. Maybe yours was simple: just four walls and a flat tar-paper roof thrown up on a hot Saturday afternoon.
Maybe you got ambitious and put on a peaked roof. Or maybe you even built something like what we've got here, in which case, congratulations and we've got a kitchen remodel we could use some help on.
Doggie Digs Through the Ages
Dogs have been making their own houses for a lot longer than we've been doing it for them. Alaskan Huskies, for example, dug snow caves to escape the harsh winter weather. According to Captain Arthur Haggerty, a dog trainer and canine historian, dogs are programmed to seek shelter. "How many times have you seen your dog sleeping under a chair or a table, or under the bed?" he says. "They select overhead cover naturally."
But Man has always tried his best to keep a roof over woofer, too. During World War II, German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois served in the American military as trackers and bomb-sniffers. They were transported in vented wooden crates, which conveniently doubled as houses on the battlefield.
There have been doggie digs on the White House lawn, too, for presidential weimaraner Heidi Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson's collie and four beagles.
Of course, we don't recommend getting as carried away as Marie Antoinette, who insisted that her Papillon's doghouse in Versailles be lined with turquoise silk. That kind of pampering sometimes isn't a good thing: Legend has it the queen so loved her dog, she carried it with her to the guillotine.
