We live on a dead end street in a quiet part of a small town that is getting larger by the minute! Our house sits on the front of our property, with a large back yard, half is open, the other half is thickly wooded and banks the brook that connects to a major resivoir.

Our dogs live in the house, but spend many hours outside when we are home. They are never left outside when we are not home. When Aimee arrived, she thought the yard was a big race track. Then Hudsan showed up, and Aimee trained her properly to be a racing Greyhound, sadly, my yard was a big dirt race track. We needed to seperate people yard and dog yard, so we took down our large above ground pool, and sectioned off 1/4 of our open yard for the dogs exclusively. We dubbed it "Dog World"

Dog World was a great place, sandy, shady, and a ramp for the dogs to play on. I credit the ramp to the muscular rears my dogs have. Hudsan, of course, would jump the fence and get out of Dog World into People Yard. We had to raise the fence... my flower gardens suffered from her rolling through them wiggling on her back. Dog World is their own space, they hang out, they play, they dig and sleep in the sun or the shade.

This past summer we had the opportunity to "revamp" our Dog World. We ripped down the decking, created a new walkway with stepping stones and pebbles, fenced in the yard, and filled it with beach sand. Seven tons of sand, four tons of pebble, sweating in the humid NJ weather for weeks, Dog World is "revitalized". We put in the sand to continue bulding muscles, it is like our own "beach". We filled two large pens with pebbles and shade tarp as well, these come in handy when the girls come into heat. We put up a Mini Max shed between the pens for storage of all my dog and show equipment. Tom was releived to get a ton of crates, chairs, ramps, bowls, and tents out of the garage!

There is a large Hemlock in the rear of the yard that Levon likes to hang out under, lots of shade trees such as multiple species of Maple, Rose of Sharon, Mulberry, and Lilac that boarder the stockade fencing (next door to Peanut's house!) and one corner backs to the short section of our woods and you can see and hear the brook. The front end is shaded by a young Birch tree and further down, going towards the woods again, we have a massive Black Walnut tree (if you look at pictures of Malcom and U-Gene as pups, they are sitting near this tree, it is a fantastic tree that gives us beautful autumn colors as well).

In the summer of 2006 we will be ripping down our deck and designing a new bi-level deck that will tie into Dog World. Here are a few pictures of our new Dog World when it was almost complete. More pictures coming soon!