April 29th, 2009 Posted in random rant | No Comments »
The Slackline Express facilities are now equipped with, drum roll please… a new doggy gate.
Teale and I both love our dogs very much, so they hang out with us while we work. They however are not allowed in the sewing shop or near products so they stay on the main floor of the house. For the most part, they play in the backyard or hang out at the top of the stairs while we work, but when it comes time for carrying the day’s packages out to the curb for pickup, things occasionally get dicey. You see, Beuford (Teale’s Golden Lab Mix) loves to run and explore. When he gets loose, he usually tries running in a straight line which makes him quite hard to catch due to his speed. Haley (my Australian Shepherd) on the other hand, usually stays close but keeps running back and forth in a “you can’t catch me and I’m not coming back inside until I’m tired of running circles around you” dance. Individually, either one is hard enough to catch, but when they both get out together, it’s both very difficult and extremely comical. Since Haley is a herding dog she’ll immediately start nipping at Beuford’s heels and trying to tackle him despite the fact he’s double her size. The end result is Beuford running even faster in a bizarre pattern trying to dodge both Haley and whoever is trying to get his leash back on him and Haley is having a ball because she has something fast to chase in a big open space.
Last week, they slipped by a newly hired employee as we were taking out postal packages and they were 1.5 miles before I was able to catch them while on my bike. They only had a 30 second head start before I was on my bike, but they bolted in a direction where I couldn’t tell which way they went).
We have other doggy gates blocking off other areas but the problem is that almost all doggy gates are really just child gates that kind of wedge themselves in a doorway, leaving you to either take 60 seconds of taking it down, stepping through and re-installing it, or in our case, optimistically trying to step over it with an arm full of boxes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I fell hard enough to dent the drywall earlier this month and was lucky not to have broken my arm. There are rather expensive swinging gate child gates that are for the top of stairs and such, but they aren’t well made and unfortunately Haley being rather clever meant she’s figured out how to open most latches that are push button based. It only took her one day to figure out how to open the swinging ones.
The other problem is that our hallway to the front door is extra wide, no commercially available gates fit it and instead you’d have to go with the ones that are designed to make a corral or dog pen, neither of which are usually either high enough to keep our dogs from jumping it, or so high we can’t step over them. So, I skipped work today and build our new custom sized, auto closing doggy gate that has some nice trim. It’s tall enough that they can’t jump it and the hidden spring system is strong enough to keep them from nosing it open. On the plus side, it’s a one way gate that can easily be opened with a hip to bring parts in and it can lock in an open position for when the dogs aren’t inside. On testing, it’s easy to open with a spare finger while you’ve got your hands full of boxes, slip through and it shuts behind you securely making the process much easier. When not in use, it can sit flush with the wall out of the way.
I’ve posted some photos below, if you look carefully you can see where our previous gates caused us to trip and it damaged the drywall. Fixing that is on my to-do list.
Click on the photo to enlarge.
So far, I’m pretty happy with our new gate, even if the dogs are less than thrilled.
Balance In Life,
Joe Kuster
