What is your setup for your dogs while you're gone?

[powerfulgazelle]

The front door opens straight out onto a busy street, which, frankly, puts my nerves through too much because of Kip's issues with bicycles/mopeds/motorcycles/lawnmowers, etc. (We live on a very straight, very long street with no stop lights. It is a residential street, but in the heart of the city. The next street over is a business district...and the the closest business to my house as the crow flies...is a Honda motorcycle shop....so the prospective bike owners take them out for a test ride on our street and open them up full tilt. Not good.) Kip has slipped out the front door before...and I am always fearful that he'll end up as road pizza.

 

So, we have a gate over the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. The dogs can roam from basement, where their crates are, up the steps to the kitchen, and out onto the deck thru the back door, but are prevented from going in the LR/to the front door. My office is upstairs, off the master bedroom, and the door to the bedroom defines Bruce's (cat) dog-free fiefdom...he is the office cat, lounges about on the desk and the bed, and has charge over observing the neighborhood from second floor windows on three sides of the house.

 

When there are no twoleggers home at all (which is unusual), dogs are most often crated in the basement...especially in the summer, when thunderstorms lurk, as Kip is phobic. (This seems to get worse the older he gets, and his crate, which is under the basement steps, next to Sol's, is his safe place.)