Luxury Housing Trends & Home Improvement Ideas

The laundry room or mud room is an ideal spot for an indoor dog kennel, because a dog door can be cut into the exterior wall to allow your pet the comfort of the indoors and excitement of the outdoors. Using plexiglass on the dog door and kennel door can ensure that your dog gets a view of everything.

When you have guests over or if there is a loud celebration going on, your dog will have a safe place to retreat. Plus, if you’re worried about accidents when you’re away, preserve your carpets and put your dog in the kennel for a couple hours until you return.

Another wonderful amenity to add to your mud room is a hand-held shower hose or sprayer, because you can wash your dog with ease. It can also come in handy when you need to rinse off muddy shoes or fill up a watering can to hydrate your indoor plants.

Doghouses are no longer simple backyard structures that just provide shade for your dog. Some dog shelters are replicas of the owner’s home, so they have porches and even “swimming pools” (a.k.a. large water bowls). So how can you make your pet’s doghouse more like an outdoor suite without going to the extreme?

Osborne & Little has a variety of outdoor fabrics and wallpapers. Their Walk in the Park wallpaper features silhouettes of different dog breeds, and if you have a female dog, the fuchsia on graphite colourway might be perfect. Wallpaper is an easy way to add color and style to your doghouse. Also, as long as you know the basics of sewing, you can create a couple doggie pillows to make the home cozy.

Instead of installing a pooch-sized porch, you can purchase some patio stones and create a foundation in front of the shelter. During the evening, your dog will enjoy lying on cool bricks.

When you have a classy interior, the last thing you want to do is break up the flow with a cat litter box. Finding a space for the box can be challenging, especially if your room designs are more open or your laundry room is small. However, you can create an illusion with cat furniture to make you and your pet happy.

The Lotus Cat Tower from Great Companions has a sleek, modern design, which can hide the litter box and provide a safe area for your cat to climb. This piece comes in a birch, mahogany or cherry finish.

The Catemporary Cat Box appears more like furniture, so this model might blend in better. It features a large entrance to make the box accessible to kitty, and it has a hinged door and litter scoop shelf for easier cleaning. The back wall and air holes on the inner shelf manage odor too. It comes in white or mahogany.

If your yard heats up in the summer, and you’re worried about Fido getting too hot, maybe a dog swimming pool is in order.

Oh, sure, any water-filled kiddie pool could work, but if you want to make sure your pooch’s claws won’t pierce the side and leave the H2O flowing out through a hole, you might want something a little more durable. Something designed just for dogs perhaps…

This bone-shaped dog swimming pool is just the ticket.

The 85 gallon pool is suitable for the largest dogs. It’s made with HMWPE–truck bed liner material–so it should have no problem standing up to claws and teeth.

And for small dogs, there’s a paw-shaped version of the pool as well.

Available through One Dog One Bone.

Pet doors are convenient for (mostly) indoor critters, especially if you work and you’re worried about Fido’s bladder lasting all day until you get home. The problem with simple pet doors, however, is that they aren’t that secure (a burglar could enter through one or stick his arm in to unlock the door). Also, pets you may not want escaping (i.e. the cat) could get out as well as the dog.

A solution to these problems is an electronic pet door.

The Plexidor shown here works much like a garage door, responding to an RFID key that hangs on your pet’s collar. When the pet approaches, the door slides open, but it won’t open for anyone who doesn’t have the transmitter. The panel also senses when something is in the middle, so it won’t close on a slow-to-move pet.

You can get the electronic pet doors in various sizes, to accommodate anything from cats to large dogs.

From Pet Doors USA.

I guess the cats my family had when I was growing up were pretty deprived: all they had to play on was a plywood cat tree covered with carpet remnants. Felines today can be pampered by a custom cedar cat playground.

These fancy feline constructs are “a durable & fun long term solution to your cats perching, active lifestyle and natural tendency to climb and explore.”

Some of the possible features you can get include:

• hammock beds (that come off for machine washing and drying)
• crows nests
• ladder bridges with sisal-covered scratch rungs
• hanging toys
• replaceable scratch pads
• pillows (of course!)

For more information, visit Wood Ruff for Pets.

You’ve got granite countertops in your kitchen for your family to eat off of–well now you can pamper your cats as well with this granite cat dish feeder.

“Made with a gorgeous slab of granite, polished to a high sheen, this unique feeder is shaped like a cat head. The granite has dark green coloring and black and gold highlights. This stone is magic: at night it looks black and when the sun shines on it, it is golden.”

The granite cat feeder is the work of Etsy artist StoneyCreekDogBowls and costs $140. (As you might guess from the name, the shop also offers stone dog dish feeders.)

The stainless steel bowls serving as eyes in the cat-head-shaped feeder are also included in the price tag.

If you work from home and you have cats, you may have noticed they always want to “help” you with your work. You know, maybe they’ll lounge on this stack of papers, or swish a tail across that keyboard, or oops, was that your pencil?

You can’t blame the cats… they just want to be where you are. The closer the better!

But perhaps if you got them a cat bed that attaches right to your desk, they’d be content to lounge in it instead of on your work. Enter the Kitt-in Box.

This pet bed can attach to the side of your desk or be placed on top of it. There are felt pads to protect your desk from damage (as if your desk hasn’t already been damaged with claw marks), and inside rests a soft cushion for Spot to recline upon.

The Kitt-In Box can support a 20 pound cat or small dog.

From the Refined Feline.

Looking for a doghouse that’s cool for Fido in the summer and warm in the winter? Try one that installs underground and takes advantage of the earth’s insulation.

The DogEden doghouse is supposed to appeal to a dog’s natural instincts to build dens in the ground. It also features 20% recycled materials, a built-in tie out, and self-heating and cooling (according to the site, when it is a cold -2 F/-18 C outside, it’ll be a comfortable 48 F/ 9 C inside, and when it’s a hot 105 F/41 C outside, it’ll be a cool 72 F/22C inside).

The underground dog house comes with a life time warranty, and there is no assembly required (of course, you’ll have to dig a hole to put it in!).

The DogEden house costs $400 and looks to be fairly indestructible. Of course, I’d never convince my dogs to move outside–they’d much prefer to make use of the climate controlled people house.

If you’ve ever dreamed of logging onto the Internet and feeding your pet remotely while at work or on vacation, apparently you’re not the only one.

“Now you can keep an eye on them while away with the power of Ergo Pet Feeders and INSTEON home control technology. Our pet feeding & viewing kit allows you to both feed your pets & view them from a computer anywhere in the world. You can also automatically have images of your pets at feeding time emailed to you on at scheduled times.”

With a camera like this, you no longer have to worry about if your cats and dogs are destroying the house while you’re gone. Now you’ll know for sure that they’re destroying the house, and maybe you can anticipate their feisty moods and distract them by dropping a morsel of food into their bowl. Hey, it beats playing Minesweeper at work, right?

$300 at SmartHome:

Remote Pet Feeding & Viewing Camera Kit