Whelping Box

From here on out I'll mostly be posting about the adventure of puppies.  Last weekend I built the whelping box.

We are in a rental house while Roger is in school.  This unfortunately means carpeted floors.  Puppies are not exactly a tidy affair, so we needed to devise a way to deal with a litter in less than optimum conditions.  

We have a small bedroom upstairs, next to our bedroom, that we have been using as a weight room.  Since we can use the gym at the university, we don’t actually use the weights much at home and since we can close this room off and heat it with a portable heater (puppies need to be warm) and it’s close to the main living areas of the house and within earshot of where we sleep, it seems an ideal spot for a litter.  

I bought a roll of cheap vinyl flooring at the local Lowes DIY store and put it down over the carpet.  The roll was 8’ x 12’ and the room is closer to 9’ x 11’ but the thin vinyl was easily cut with my medical shears and I was able to fill most of the gap on one side with the remnant and cover the rest up with the back of the whelping box I built.  

I splurged on this cool foam matting I found which comes in a package of 4 interlocking pieces (it was about $20 for the package of 4).  I had planned to put a piece of vinyl down over the 4x4 plywood bottom of the whelping box (to make cleaning it easier) but I got these neat foam pieces instead.  They are thick and cushy so it will give Red a nicer surface to lay on while still being cleanable (and reusable!).  

This whelping box is very simple, and cost about $40 for materials (not including the cool foam mats).  I made my plans and cut list before I went to the store and they cut all my wood for me (since we are in temporary living quarters, we don’t have our table saw and workshop and all that here). 

From a 4 x 8 sheet of 3/8-inch plywood (~ $15) I got the 4 x 4 bottom and 3 16” pieces for the 2 sides and the back.  One 1’ x 6” x 8’ piece of ‘white wood’ (I think it’s pine) was cut into two 4’ pieces for the front. One 2 x 2 ((I splurged on a nice one used for exterior decking (~$7) instead of the really warped less expensive fir pieces (~2.50)) was cut to make the corner uprights.  For the pigging rails (the pieces you see along the sides and back on the inside of the box which are there for puppy safety – i.e. to keep the mother from laying on a pup) I got hemlock 1 x 2’s that had smooth rounded edges.  Some 1.5-inch and 1.25-inch wood screws and there you are.