build my own dog bed!

I was surfing on the internet the other day and stumbled upon a website that has instructions on how to make an elevated dog bed from PVC pipes. I thought, why not give it a try since Happy's current 'store-bought' elevated bed (also using PVC pipes) is almost 2 years old and I want to have an extra bed for her on the balcony. So, D & I went hunting for PVC pipes and fittings at hardware stores downtown. It turned out that the stores did not carry a type of fittings called a 3-ways connectors which was required to make the bed frame. What a pity!! BUT, I did not give up. I came home and started trawling the net again to see if I can get some ideas on how to modify the bed using some other more common pipe fittings such as the elbows and the T's joint. It worked! I managed to came up with a model that is just as good, albeit having to use more pipes and fittings! So, we went downtown again to procure the pipes and fittings. After building the frame of the bed, the next challenge was to get an appropriate fabric to nail onto the bed frame. I wanted a fabric that is tough and can be easily maintain. I settled for Cordura type fabric with at least 600D-1000D (Those fabric that luggages and haversacks are made of). So there I went again, this time to Sham Shui Po to hunt for the fabric. My goodness! I thought it was going to be an easy task because Sham Shui Po has these few streets that sells nothing but fabric, kind of like a wholesale place for fabrics! But alas! I walked down the whole street almost 2km and went into all the shops asking about cordura fabric and none of them knew what I was talking about! Gosh! If only I knew the name of the fabric in Cantonese! Thank God as I almost gave up searching, I went into another store and tried and described the fabric to a guy, he understood! He said he roughly knew what I wanted and said that no stores on this particular street carry this fabric! He went the extra mile and drew me a map of 2 possible stores that might have it and gave it to me. The stores were on another street about 3km away from where I was! Gosh! I was so tired already, but I pushed on and went ahead and looked for the stores he described. To cut a long story short, I managed, with some efforts to locate the stores and bought the fabric! hooray!

I managed to make the elevated bed for Happy (of course with some help from D to nail the fabric onto the bed frame tautly). But bad news! Happy didn't like it! Probably due to the differences in the tension and texture of the new fabric and possibly the height of the bed too. (I made it slightly higher than her current bed). Dogs are such creatures of habits! I was pretty upset about it! Sigh! After so much effort in procuring the materials! I dismantled the bed and later realised that I did not even take a photo of it first, so I can't post any pics of the bed here! Such a pity! This dog bed project sparked my interest in building things using pvc pipes (also on the ground that I do not want to waste the pvc pipes that I still have), which I'll post on my other blog when I get a chance. So long!