This is going to be really long. I apologize in advance. But I need to see if anybody has any ideas I haven't thought of.
I have a 9 month old puppy. Her name is Bailey, and she's a Border Collie/Flat Coated Retriever mix. She's 37 lbs. My problem is that I need to figure out something to do with her during the day while I'm not home. Right now, she's staying in her crate while I'm gone, but I feel horrible about it. Thankfully, my mom and I have different work schedules, so she's only stuck there for 5-6 hours a day, instead of 8-9 hours, but I still hate it.
My ideal situation would be to have a large kitchen that she could stay in and have a doggie door in the back door so she could go outside and run around the yard and go potty when she needs to. The problem is that my house is not set up like that. Our whole downstairs pretty much is carpeted, and the kitchen (which is the only part that is not carpeted) is tiny. Literally, it's about the size of 3 of Bailey's crates lined up end to end. And the backdoor is not in the kitchen, but rather in the dining room, which is carpeted. I'm afraid that if we let her stay out of her crate all day, she'll end up pottying in the house. (She won't potty in her crate, but she'll go elsewhere in the house if she's desperate enough.) That may not be a problem if we could put in a doggy door and let her run around outside when she wants, but now we have 2 more problems. First, our back door is almost entirely glass. It's just one big window, so it wouldn't be easy to just install a doggie door. We could get a new door, but that may end up being somewhat costly. Even if we did, that leads to the next problem: our yard is not fenced. And it would be quite difficult to fence. We have a very odd shaped lot, and our back yard is one large blacktop patio with woods behind it, and there's a huge drop-off down to a creek. We've thought about invisible fencing, but I've heard that in order to run it, they would have to cut through the asphalt to lay the wires. Not only would that really increase the cost of installing the system, but also my mom is not at all happy with the idea of cutting up our patio.
I came up with the idea of doing something like this upstairs, since when you walk in our front door, it opens into a big tiled entry way and hall. That would be a perfect place for her to hang out during the day. Plus, our front door is wood, not glass, so we could probably install a doggie door with few problems. And, our front yard is nice and level and a standard rectangle shape, with only a small sidewalk, so it would be easy to fence or invisible fence. But my mom does not like the idea of putting a doggie door in our front door or letting Bailey out in the front yard when we're not home, which I can't really blame her for.
I briefly considered fencing a smaller area of the back yard to create a pen for her where she could stay during the day, but I quickly dicarded that notion. First off, there's no way Bailey could survive the Midwest summers outside all day, even if she did have shelter to get out of the sun. She's got a thick black coat that holds heat something terrible. Plus, we get some severe storms that come through, and with all the trees that are around my house, there are constantly limbs falling, so it just wouldn't be safe.
I can't really get a neighbor to look in on here during the day. My neighbors who are home are elderly, and I can't impose upon them. Plus with Bailey being a puppy, she's very energetic and excited, and she constantly jumps and pulls on her leash. I'd be afraid one of my neighbors would get hurt. As for the younger nieghbors, most are gone during the day too, and those who aren't, well, let's just say I wouldn't trust them coming into my home. Also, we've considered hiring a dog walker or enrolling her in a "doggie daycamp", but we can't afford anything like that right now. And it's really bad, because my mom and I both work too far away from home to even run by on lunch hour to take her out. (And I don't even get a lunch break where I work, but that's a whole other story.)
So this is where I am right now. I know, people will say I should have thought of all this before I got a dog. But I got her when she was 12 hours old, and I had to take her, or she would have been immediately put to sleep, and I just could not let that happen. I've hand raised her since. And when I got her, I was in school and only had half day classes. I expected to be in school for a couple more years, so it would have been fine, but then I decided I hated the program I was in, so I withdrew and wound up getting a full-time job.
So if anyone has ANY ideas at all, no matter how odd they seem, PLEASE let me know. I'm trying to think outside the box, but it just isn't working. I really want to try to work out some kind of better arrangement for my baby.
Thanks in advance!
