Dummy Plans for a Doggy Door

DIY dog  door flap

A long-ago coworker of one of our staffers once put together a DIY doggy door for the back porch of her Colorado bungalow. She'd already paid (handsomely) for a commercial pet door from the kitchen to the porch, so she simply cut a hole in the outside door and covered it with a scrap of carpet. It took some trial-and-error, but she got it to work – mostly by luck... We're pretty sure that someone who follows the instructions for "How to Build a Dog Door Flap" that Courtney McCaffrey posted to TheNest.com¹ would also need some trial and error.

First things first: McCaffrey's instructions for cutting a flap from a rubber mat would probably work, assuming the mat were flexible enough for a dog to push through. She even got the message (from somewhere...) that you'll need a strip of aluminum to secure the rubber instead of simply putting some holes in the rubber. It's the rest of her post that made us wonder where on earth she got her "instructions." She didn't get them from either of the references she cited, for whatever that's worth...

Unfortunately, McCaffrey's post left our staffers with plenty of questions, including: Do you put that flap on the inside or outside? WTF is a "small tube of silicone"? What if the door is metal and wood screws won't work? What if the door has a hollow core? We suppose that Courtney's instructions would work if you were trying to replace a worn-out flap on a commercial door, because those tend to be rather pricey. However, the question includes asked how to "build," and McCaffrey blithely ignored that word; instead choosing to pretend that the OQ already had a hole cut in a door. Come to think of it, Courtney's instructions wouldn't work for a commercial door, either, because they have plastic or metal frames. In other words, her command to

"Drill the wood screws through the holes and into the door until they're tight..."

...probably wouldn't work all that well. They also wouldn't be of much use for a hollow-core door, which has only a thin skin of lauan on the surface. McCaffrey's instructions say nothing about the access hole for the door – just that it's there. We call "insufficient detail due to insufficient thought"!

So although our Courtney managed to figure out how to make a flap, she didn't know how to build the hole it would go into. That's pretty much the level of thought that can earn a freelancer another Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ Courtney's byline originally cited Demand Media, so we suspect TheNest bought this content from DMS. That would make a lot of sense...

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