Life in dogs
Every now and then my brain becomes good for nothing but making hideous composite images. I decided to make one about dogs that I absolutely must experience owning in my lifetime. The choices were very hard! About 60 dogs made the list of those I’d have if life was long enough.
We’d likely be able to have two dogs at once. I’ve put an Assistance Dog icon next to the one that would most likely be my working dog at that time. The final row is tricky because each of those breeds have various attributes that might make them good as Assistance Dogs. It also depends on what my needs end up being at that time.
By rounding dog lifespans up and down to around 10 years, we can separate these dogs by decades of our lives. Freya can be considered the dog of our 20s, even though she’ll hopefully live into our 30s (she’s 10 years old in June!).
No matter how tight money is, I will definitely need to get a Labrador puppy in my 30s because I need a working dog. Freya cannot retire 100% because I need things from her. There are some things I’ve reduced asking her to do because she’s old, but there’s always something I can’t do by myself.
Anyway, we want to have a pet Corgi alongside that, and Will wants an Irish Wolfhound in the future, and is also very keen on Borzois.
Maybe we’ll be those lucky, wealthy people that can have 5 dogs at once, and then we’d get to experience a lot more of them. I think Will’s job and our family life would have to be much more geared-up for that though. Dog ownership is a lifestyle, and it obviously is a lifestyle we want, but having 5 dogs is very different to having 1 or 2.
Anyway, if things go according to this list, it would take us to our 70s!
I’m passionate about rare breeds and rare colours not being so rare. So there are a few Vulnerable Native Breeds on this list, as well as preferences for the rarer coat colours of more common breeds.
But yeah, this was a very hard list to narrow down!
In a waiting room recently I was reading a self-build magazine that Will got me, and, you may not be surprised to learn, this prompted another experiment on our house plan.
The idea of a downstairs master suite has been growing on me massively, further encouraged by the issue of the magazine I’m reading at the moment. But, I haven’t liked the bungalow experiments I’ve done with this plan, I much prefer the two-storey version.
So I met the idea in the middle; I added a master bedroom and en suite, extended the conservatory a bit, but kept the overall shape of the main house.
The upstairs plan might be shuffled about slightly to improve the other bedrooms, but I wouldn’t do much else to it, and the family bathroom would still be up there.
I like that going through the conservatory kind of mentally separates the bedroom from the rest of the house, so it doesn’t feel like just being next door to the living room. It’s easy to let the dogs out in the mornings, or in the night when they do inevitable dog pukes, and the room is right there during annual barbecues, either for doing a flop or for private girly conversations with Kadek and Jodi when we’re in our late 30s!
I’ve sketched a new version of the exterior. My drawings are where perspective goes to die, so I apologise for how hideous and wonky this is, but hopefully you can see what I’m going for.
There might be space for some sort of carport next to the ground floor bedroom, I’m not particularly big on full garages, I don’t know why. It all depends on the kind of plot we get anyway. And if it’s even in the UK at all, and the various housebuilding laws that could apply to Israel or anywhere else.
I absolutely love overhanging gablet roofs, they are totally my shit, but they are hard to illustrate. So are pent/ skirt roofs, (apparently also called brow roofs), which are also hard to draw.
So yeah, these are the plans I have for my future at the moment.