DIY Homemade Animal Crate for Dogs or Pigs (or other Barnyard Friends)
This post may contain affiliate links, view our disclosure policy for details.
Have you ever looked at the price of animal crates? They are CRAZY expensive! When we first bought our pot belly pig she spent the nights in a cat carrier in my kid’s bedroom since we have a lot of foxes and had no way to close up her outdoor pen at night. But as you can imagine she has gotten quite a bit larger! We realized that she needed a new crate and started looking on Craigslist. The only thing we could find were 1+ hours away or overpriced. So my husband decided we would just build her a crate! You can easily change this idea for any size dog you have as well. This crate we use ONLY for her to sleep in at night – she does NOT even go in this crate during the day.
We bought six 2×4’s that were 8 feet long and 1 box of screws. (you’ll need about 50+ screws) You’ll also need 2 small scraps of wood and a piece of plywood which we already had here at the house. The wood cost us $20 and the box of screws were under $3. Cut ALL six 2×4’s in half.
Four will be used for the corners, then screw 3 boards onto 3 different sides – leaving the middle board off of the fourth side as you see in the front here. We used two small scraps of wood so that we could slide this plywood “door” in place after our pig walks in. If you have a larger animal you can also cut slots for a sliding plank of wood instead of this plywood door.
The small circle hole in the plywood allows us to open it easier. The big black spot you see in the crate is our pig! As you can see our crate is PLENTY big for her to have all sorts of room to grow! If we really needed a bigger crate we could tack the same structure onto the front opening of this one to make it twice as long. You can easily make a simimilar crate like this for dogs with smaller side openings and more wood on the top as well so that the dog(s) cannot jump out. We paid just $25 for this entire project from start to finish. The crates that we were looking at for her cost $80+. It took about 30 minutes to build this and was a HUGE savings for us! We are thinking of building a smaller crate about half the size with a bottom on it so that if we need to put her in the car to take her to the vet we could move her a lot easier.
