DIY No-Slip Dog Feeder

I am a compensated 3M-sponsored blogger. Opinions re my own and additional products used in the project were selected by me.

I’ve been meaning to do this project for years.

Ever since Charlie was a puppy, she’s had a bad habit of turning her bowl over while she eats. She seems to be endlessly amused by my frustration with it and the dog food strewn all over the floor. After lots of adventures with her running a ceramic cereal bowl into the wall and chipping it, I went out and bought some new stainless steel bowls. But I knew from past experience that I would rather just go ahead and solve the root of the problem as well.

The plan: build Charlie a new DIY dog feeder with feet that wouldn’t get pushed or tipped over so easily. I ran out to the store and came back with my supplies:

Materials Needed

• 12″ x 24″ poplar board
• 3 – poplar strips to cover the sides
• 3 – pre-primed stair balusters
• straight ruler & measuring tape
• 2 – dog food bowls with a lip edge (I think these were the large size)
• pencil
• razor blade scraper (to get the stickers off the wood)
• 1/2″ Forstner bit
• jigsaw
• clamps
• sandpaper
• wood glue
• wood putty
• stain (if you so choose) and a poly you like
• (sponsor) Scotch® Non-slip Gripping Pads

I’m not going to include a cut list here, because it’s going to vary based on the size of the bowls, the height of the feeder that you need to customize for your dog (here’s a good example of how you figure this out), and plain old aesthetics. But my legs wound up being about 15″ each, and I ripped the entire board down to about 10.5″ wide just because I didn’t want there to be large strips of wood in front or behind the bowls in the finished result. Customize to your liking!

1. Cut holes for each bowl

(Hey, that rhymes!) First, I flipped the board to the back and used a pencil to trace along the outer lip of the bowls (as you can see in the supply pic above, they both had a small lip that would help hold them in place). It’s going to take some measuring if you’re as much of perfectionist as I am, but I tried to get each bowl to have equal spacing on the sides, middle, and edges. Then, I hand drew the lip a little further in, which would provide enough of an edge all around the bowl for it to rest on. A Forstner bit is an easy way to drill a pilot hole (dealer’s choice for a spade bit instead if you don’t have one of these), and then I used a jigsaw to cut out each hole. It wasn’t exactly perfect, but that doesn’t matter much…

2. Cut and add the legs and edges

I used the table top in the middle of my kitchen for the majority of this project since it was level and easy to just leave something to cure on it. First, I cut the primed balusters to about 15″ and then glued them in place for legs. Once they were dry, I flipped everything over to right-side up and clamped wood strips to all four sides to make the top look a little more dressed up. See? Pretty.

3. Fill, Sand, Poly

To fill in any gaps of the edge pieces, I used a little wood filler and sanded the whole top down. I’ll admit, I was kind of lazy and didn’t bother to paint the pre-primed legs because they already looked fine, but I did add some high-performance water-based poly to the top to help bring out the grain a little more and protect the wood from sloppy water bowl abuse. It wasn’t until later that I added more stability to the bottom left and right side, but I mainly did it for aesthetic reasons (see photos below). You can leave it without, or cut more lengths of the balusters to make the sides look more mid-century.

4. Add non-slip gripping pads to the base

The whole point of this project was to keep Charlie from shoving this thing across the floor, so I was glad to have Scotch® Brand as a sponsored partner on this project. The Scotch® Gripping Pads seemed perfect to add to the base to keep it from sliding across the floor in case an overzealous pooch decided to play with her food. I was sure I was going to need the largest size, but I wound up using the medium ones instead.

They come as a pack, but they are easy to separate and stick on the bottom of the legs and the middle support of the base on both sides.

I used a total of six, but I can add more if I need to at a later point.

5. Done!

Once things are all flipped over and dry, it’s ready for dog food and related furball messes.

From the front:

From the side (because why not):

It was a nice day outside and I’d already been working on the bar area in the kitchen, so I temporarily placed the new stand near the sliding glass door. I won’t be keeping it over here, but Charlie was plenty intrigued. She’s been eating out of it without a tipping incident ever since.

Yay for happy endings!

Project created by Sarah Fogle of The Ugly Duckling House for Scotch® Mounting and Fastening

The post DIY No-Slip Dog Feeder appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

DIY No-Slip Dog Feeder published first on https://noambouzaglou.wordpress.com/