Papasan Dog Hut

That's Penny above, looking like a sperm whale about to eat a giant squid, and that's Pepper below, looking like a little red Wookie.

During one of our weekly sojourns to the dump, Handan spied half a Papasan chair in Put & Take. We gathered it up, saucer and cushion, and crammed it into our car. Back home, the cushion became Penny and Pepper’s new bed until it finally disintegrated into a heap of torn fabric and shredded foam padding after a vigorous fight with the spin cycle. The bamboo saucer bade its time in the Basement of Unloved Castaways until last spring when Handan emerged with it, proclaiming: “Babes, you will make a dog igloo with this!” I kept a straight face and stayed silent. “Babes?” Handan looked this way and that. I hoped she would go away if I didn’t move or say anything. I remembered a scene from Jurassic Park in which Dr. Grant says to the young girl, Lex, as she screams at the sight of a Tyrannosaurus rex crushing the SUV she has just evacuated, “Don’t move! He can’t see us if we don’t move!” I prayed my wife was like a T. rex. She looked around, uncertain, then sniffed the air. Once. Twice. Damn! She caught my scent! Her pupil constricted as she brought her great and powerful eye to bear on me. A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead, betraying my presence. “Ah, there you are. Yeah, like I said, we’re going to turn this chair into a shade structure for the girls.” She smiled and walked away with a bounce in her step. I feigned stupidity – the last refuge of the desperate. “How?” Handan started to explain. I countered her efforts with a blank stare. Heheheh, it was working. She couldn’t explain it, at least not to a pseudo-stupid like me! She tried drawing her plans. It looked like a plate of spaghetti, so I nodded enthusiastically, rubbed my belly and made slurping noises. She threw down the pencil and paper in frustration. Her head snapped up. “AHA!” She said. “I’ll show you what I mean!” Damn! Defeated again. She was about to go all engineer-y on me. I could feel it. “Get those Dollar Store tiki torches in the shed! I’ll get some jute.” I got the torches, and she got the jute. Handan then got to work lashing the torch stakes to the chair.

She finished her lashings and stood. I looked on, pleased and beaming. “Great job, my babes! The girls are going to love it!” That wasn’t so bad. Really, I didn’t do much at all! “You silly bugger! This isn’t for the girls! This is to show you what I want!” She went on to explain the ins and outs of the real project, using her mock-up as a teaching aid. My face fell. Awwwwwwwww….nuts! The jig was up. She had me hooked, landed and gutted. I grabbed the damn Papasan, went down to the basement and gave it the stink eye while I figured out a plan. I remembered Handan babbling something about a planter ring around it so morning glories could grow up and over the top, creating some sort of magical floral canopy. Okay, a circular planter box. Out of wood. Yeah, that wasn’t going to work. Hmmmm…how about an octagonal box, since there were eight radial support arms? Yeah, that could work. And how about if I left two sections out of the octagon to serve as the entrance? Yep, that might be pretty okay. Time to get busy with the chopper. But first, some angles and measurements. If we consider a square frame, we know that each corner is a 90 degree angle. The sum of the angles is 360 degrees. To make that corner from two pieces of wood, we would cut each piece to a 45 degree angle and glue them together. For an octagon (8-sides), each corner is a 45 degree angle (360/8). To make that angle from two pieces of wood, we simply chop them at a 22.5 degree angle. I set my miter saw to 22.5 degrees. Since this is a common setting, it is marked on my saw and has a stop-lock there. I can hear you, you know. I can hear your thoughts. “Oh, well that’s great for you, but I don’t have a miter saw! How am I supposed to make a 22.5 degree cut?!?” The answer is simple, madam. You only need a protractor a pencil and a hand saw to achieve the same cut. But how long to make each piece? I wanted the inner diameter of the octagonal ring to be equal to the diameter of the Papasan chair. I knew how wide my cedar planks were, so a bunch of math happened, and I had my answer. I cut six pieces in this fashion and laid them out on the floor.

Using my Kreg Jig, screws and wood glue, I joined the pieces into pairs.

I can hear you again. “Well, that’s just great, but how the hell are you going to plant morning glories on planks, eh smart guy?” Madam, please. Strap yourself in, because we are about to enter….THE THIRD DIMENSION! [cue spooky music] Years of rigorous study taught me that dirt stays better in a box than on a plank, so I set out to create vertical walls for my quasi-octagonal ring. More math happened. I also had to employ the “compound” part of my “compound miter saw.” Okay, madam, you’re right about this part. Compound cuts, while not impossible, are much more difficult to do by hand. I worked in sections, building up my plank pairs into THE THIRD DIMENSION. [cue spoo….ah never mind!]

When my sections were complete, I glued and screwed them all together.

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CLICK HERE TO SEE THE STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL.

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We bought four handles for the sides from Hobby Lobby to make carrying easier.

We placed it in a nice corner where our the girls can hang out and chill all summer long.

“But where are Penny and Pepper? Why don’t you have a photo with them in the hut?” Jeez, you ask a lot of questions, you know that? Well, lemme tell you…herding those girls ain’t easy. When I want them to do something, they find something totally engaging and urgent on the other side of the yard. It’s like when you take your car to the mechanic so he can hear that sound you’ve been worried about… But with the aid of a few treats, I was able to corral them in long enough to get a glamour shot.

Thanks for reading!

CLICK HERE TO FIND MORE DIY & Craft projects from The Navage Patch. 

-Greg