I made a raised dog bed about a year ago, but the dog stairs we got off of Amazon are really only ~18″ tall. The dog bed is ~24-17 inches off the ground when you consider the pillow on top of it so that last jump from 18-24 inches is a bit much for our small Dachshunds. So, I resolved to make them some stairs that would meet this need and also just be a lot cleaner looking and match the bed.
I resolved to make the whole thing out of recycled wood (recycled from old projects of mine that I had taken apart). I had a lot of wood leftover from the second iteration of the coffee table that I had just deconstructed so I mostly used that. I knew that I wanted to the design to match as much as possible with the farmhouse design of the dog bed itself as well.
My design incorporated three stairs: three treads and three backers. I wanted the treads to have a small amount of overhang on the front (so the backer would be set back ~ 1″) and the front would be rounded off fully. The treads and backers would be bracketed by full walls (so the sides were diagonals instead of matching the outline of the stairs themselves.
I cut down and planed a series of scrap pine and then glued them all together to form a single sheet. I cut out both stair sides from this sheet. I took a 2 x 4 and cut off ~1/16″ to create a thin sheet. I cut and glued these to the flat side pieces to try to create a farmhouse-type look. In some of the pictures below you can see the table saw marks in these trim pieces – I thought this was a nice embellishment and decided not to sand it out. All the little holes in these trim piece were from screws used to secure the 2 x 4 to the old coffee table top.
I cut the stair and backer pieces from leftover 2 x 6’s and planed them down. I set one of the sides down on the bench and then applied glue to both ends of all of the stair and backer and support pieces and placed them and then placed the other side on top of that and clamped it all up. It was quite a precarious way to do this as it was really hard to line everything up, but this wasn’t a very fancy project so I went for it and it worked. The whole piece is held together with only glue, except I added some little blocks beneath the stair treads and screw them in, just in case the glue gave out – I didn’t want the dogs getting hurt =).
After construction I painted it white with a single coat of KILZ and called it a day. My wife applied some cotton batting and some fabric on top of the treads so that the dogs didn’t slip and secured them with staples (mostly on the underside).
