DIY CHALLENGE FOR THE NEW PUPPY
For those of you who didn’t know, I (Becky) got a brand new puppy! His name is Danny and he is a Border Collie. We are so in love with our new TSG family member that we’ve decided to base this week’s DIY on him! (Click here to learn more about him and here for more puppy footage!)
Telus approached us with a challenge; make the same DIY with and without technology. Our take on this challenge is for Kelsey to use no power tools or other technology, and for me to be able to use whatever I'd like! To tie in Danny, we’ve decided that the item that we each have to make is a dog bed. Here’s how we did it:
GET INSPIRED
The first thing we needed to do was find inspiration. For me, it was as easy as hopping on her smartphone to grab some inspo pics off of Pinterest (check out ours here!!). Kelsey had to take the old-fashioned route and hit the books at the good ol’ library.
KELSEY’S NO-TECH TENT BED
Kelsey got some inspiration from the library and decided to make a dog bed that resembles a tent! She decided to use materials that we had lying around the office. She picked up a piece of pine, and used some dowels we already had.
She measured out the length that she wanted the dowels to be and cut to size, with a hand saw. She then cut the pine into four pieces, each roughly two feet long, again cut by hand with a hand saw. If you’re cutting with a hand saw, it might be easier to go with softer woods.
She then took two of her two foot pine pieces and crossed them over one another in a triangle shape. Next step was to nail through the two pieces of wood, and then through the end of one of the dowels.
She did the same thing with the other two pieces of pine, and nailed that into the other end of the dowel. She then added the two remaining dowels on the bottom of the tent and nailed them into place. She then sanded away any rough edges or wood glue, again by hand.
She then took a mesh curtain that we had from a previous DIY, and decided to create a cover for the tent. She intended on hot gluing the mesh to the dowels, but we decided that wasn’t allowed and so she used a needle and thread to secure the mesh to the dowels. The last step is a name tag for Danny. Kelsey cut a small piece of wood to size, and hand wrote Danny’s name with white paint.
She glued some rope to the name tag, and hung it on the tent. And that’s it! One no-tech doggy tent finished!
BECKY’S TECH MID-CENTURY MODERN BED
I got some inspiration from Pinterest and found some really trendy mid-century modern furniture pieces to work off of.
I grabbed some leftover materials we had in the office, and found a piece of wood roughly around 35 inches long. This is the piece I decided to use as the back of my dog bed. To build the base, I decided to cut the remaining pieces I had to the length of the back piece. For this I used an electric circular saw.
To join the two larger pieces I cut, I used two smaller pieces of wood (all joined together by my handy drill of course!). The next step was to add the appliances for the legs that i’m planning to attach later. I can’t imagine hand screwing all of these guys into the bed! Next I cut a few pieces of wood to fit around the edge of the bed to create sides! After cutting, I sanded them with an electric sander and drilled them into place on the sides of my bed.
Next, I stained the wood and added the legs into the appliances I drilled in earlier.
The last step is to make a sign for my bed! I used my computer, Silhouette machine, and some gold sticky paper to cut out some fancy text spelling out Danny’s name. After that was cut, I attached it to a piece of faux leather and nailed it onto the front of my bed. Add a pillow and blanket, and you’re done! The tech mid-century modern bed is done!
We definitely ended up making two very different projects, and we really noticed the huge difference that technology makes in our DIY lives. We realised that we don’t even think about having these incredible tools at our disposal until we are forced to not use them anymore. It’s crazy to think that when Telus launched their Future is Friendly campaign in the year 2000 that technology was still scary and intimidating to so many people. And now it’s such a huge part of our lives and is constantly changing the ways we live, work, and even DIY! Telus is also SO much more than a telco, it’s a company committed to bettering the lives of Canadians through technology!
Thank you so much for reading, and be sure to check out our no-tech DIY struggles in the video below. If you try making a DIY dog bed, be sure to show us using the hashtag #SorryGirlsSquad!