We've ended up taking in a couple of stray dogs, along the way, but they were not at all interested in becoming house pets. It appears they've always lived outside & don't want to be confined to the small space, so we set about to give them a safe space, here.
We started by building a kennel for them to stay in at night, because the coyotes & mountain lion sounds are pretty close some nights, and the kids take them out during the day to play.
Between my busy schedule & my bad knee, though, I have been having trouble getting them out & about enough, when the kids aren't around. So, we closed off the side yard to create a run for them.
Their kennel opens up directly into their yard, which also encompasses the entire area under the archway, that leads to the front door of the Cabin. It ends along the bank of the pond, so encompasses some of the tree coverage on that side of the yard, giving them lots of options for shelter & places to lay around or dig.
Their primary complaint is this one specific squirrel that likes to taunt them from just beyond the fence. That seems to be the first place they run for every time we let them out for supervised free roaming.
Setting posts for the fence was a challenge because the soil here is extremely compacted & has a solid rock layer anywhere from 1' to 3' down, depending on where you are. In the case of this fence, it was on the shallow side of that so a typical gate, with a single post on each side, simply wouldn't hold.
So, I repurposed what used to be the framework for a shelving unit, before it broke apart, and formed a gate. It's made of square tubing, so it's sturdy, and allowed me to structure it to have support from all directions, in order to compensate for being less anchored into the ground.
I had a spare archway laying around so, I built it over to span the space over the gate and, naturally, that meant I needed something to grow on said arch so, of course, that meant setting some raised beds and adding a couple of rose bushes.
Henry, the cutie in the picture, kept sticking his head through the wire on the gate & I didn't want him to get scratched so I added on some scrap beekeeper mesh to the bottom of the gate. Looks funny, but it works.
The roses seem to be doing pretty well, despite being transplanted a bit later than is generally advised. I plan to underplant with purslane because, not only are they pretty, all parts of the plant are useful.