Dog Essentials on a Budget - The Bed

Even though we have a few weeks to go, we are starting to prepare things ready for Maple. This is partly in anticipation and excitement, but also to help Gromit, our old dog to become accustomed to some new stuff around the house.

We have decided to try to save some $$$ where possible, but not where it will matter for health and happiness of our dogs.

The first thing was to make a dog bed rather than buy one. Gromit prefers to sleep up on 1 particular sofa in the house, and that is fine. But when Maple is here, until she is toilet trained she will not be permitted up on the sofa, nor into the carpeted kids playroom where the kid and dog sofa is located.

But I wasn't happy with the price tags on the dog beds in the various shops that I was in. When Gromit was younger he destroyed several beds and baskets etc. So the other day I took at trip to our local op shop. I was able to buy a single bed doona (polyester fill duvet) in fantastic condition for only $5.00 It was in such great shape that I actually considered keeping it for one of the guest beds! At the same time as buying the doona, I also bought a couple of blanket scraps for $1.00 each.

First I folded the doona into quarters. I tacked down each of the 4 corners of the folded size, and also tacked down in the middle of the short ends and 2X on the long sides. I thought that this would help the doona to keep the smaller size and not slip and shift around to become lumpy.

Then I took one of the blanket scraps and make a slip case for the doona. There was a bit of a hole in the edge of the scrap, so I had to patch that up. The slip case is a little short on the underside. I am debating whether or not to leave it as it is, or to sew some of the other matching blanket scrap onto the slip case to totally encase the doona.

I also made a smaller size bed to go in the crate out of an old, flatish pillow that we had lying around the house. Just put the pillow in a water resistant pillow protector, then in an old pillow case, and wrapped the left over blanket scrap from Vinnies around it.

As you can see, Gromit enjoyed giving the new bed a test run.