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.

DIY Doggy Doors, the Dummies Version

An actual homemade doggy door

We don't know about everyone else, but we keep seeing these ads about "essential skills" everyone's grandpa had. We sure as heck aren't gonna touch that clickbait, but we certainly hope that one of those so-called skills was some form of logic. Yesterday, we featured some idiot who wanted you to dissolve Epsom salt in water and then let it evaporate to make your own Epsom salt; and today's DotD is just about the same brand of fool. Meet Simon Thomas, whose post "A Homemade Doggy Door"¹ appears at TheNest.com (though it started its life at eHow.com...).

Doggy Crates for DIY Dummies

These plans will not make this crate...

Many of the staffers here at Antisocial Network World Headquarters are do-it-yourselfers, which is one reason why they spend a lot of time making fun of ridiculous DIY instructions at places like HomeSteady.com, HubPages.com, and Hunker.com (to name a few). The main reason a lot of people do it themselves is that they think they make something cheaper than a commercial version. We're gonna test that idea today based on and article at TheNest.com: "How to Build an Inside Wood Dog Crate" by Courtney McCaffrey.

Indoor Bike Trainers for the Dummy Cyclist

No, Elle, the "rods" do not go "in the cogs"!

Every English speaker (and, or at least we hear, speakers of other languages) has words they use when they don't know the correct word; like "doohickey" or "thingumabob." Obviously, when one's pretending expertise, we can't use those inexact terms, so what can we do? Well, if you're like Elle Di Jensen (aka L. D. Jensen) of the Leaf Group site TheNest.com, you simply make it up; just like Elle did when she posted "How to Hook Up Bike Tires to Exercise Indoors."

Brick Walls for the Dummy DIY Mason

Brick wall terminology and parts

There's an old saying, "Never send a boy to do a man's job." Though the average age of our staff here at the Antisocial Network is well beyond the teens, we still think this particular saying is somewhat ageist. We think the saying would be better if it were more along the lines of "Never send a dumbass to do a competent person's job." Sadly, that's never been the motto at the internet content farms: around their offices, too often the motto seems to be "all dumbass every day: competence be damned!" How else would you get people like Shala Munroe of TheNest.com (another Leaf Group niche) who clearly demonstrated her incompetence in "How to Estimate the Cost of a Brick Fence." Shala has parlayed her "communications degree" into owning a flower shop, but her resume doesn't mention masonry work at all – and it definitely shows!