Are you a daydreamer?
I am a little.
I tend to look at something and start turning it over in my mind. What would I change? What would I keep? Could it work better if it were set up differently?
A lot of people who end up in this industry think that way. They walk through a facility, quietly taking notes in their heads, or they start from nothing and build something piece by piece in their imagination. It’s not just curiosity. There’s a bit of ownership in it, even before anything is real. A sense that if they were the ones making the decisions, it would come together differently.
We went through that ourselves.
A couple of years ago, when we were building our house, we had the same kind of conversations. You start with the ideal version. Everything is intentional. Everything has a reason. It’s easy to say yes to all of it when it only exists on paper.
Veronica had a clearer picture than I did. She had specific things she wanted, things that felt non-negotiable at the time. It felt a bit like watching one of those home renovation shows where every detail gets discussed and justified, the layout, the finishes, the doors, and even the garage.
And then, slowly, reality works its way in.
You start asking different questions. Not what would be nice, but what actually matters. What needs to happen now, what can wait, and what probably doesn’t need to happen at all.
After living in the house for a while, there are things I’d change. Not because it doesn’t work, but because we understand it better now than we did when we built it. Some of those decisions will cost us later. Some will be small irritations we live with.
But even with all that, it’s still better than what was there before.
That’s the part that matters.
With a house, most of the mistakes you make are inconvenient. You notice them, adjust around them, and eventually fix them if they matter enough.
With a kennel, those same kinds of decisions don’t stay in the background. They show up in how dogs move through the space, how they react to it, and how much control you actually have over what’s happening day to day.
That’s where the question of buying versus building shifts.
At first, it feels like a simple comparison. One option already exists; the other doesn’t. One gets you open faster, the other gives you more control. Most people stop there.
But if you sit with it a little longer, it becomes something else entirely.
You’re not really deciding between two buildings. You’re deciding what kind of system you’re going to operate inside of, and how much of that system is actually yours.
When you buy an existing kennel, you inherit a system that already exists. Along with it, you take on the cost of trying to shape that system into something it was never designed to be.
When you build, you take on the responsibility of creating it from scratch.
Neither is easy. They just come with different kinds of work.
What You Step Into
When we took over our place, it felt like we were getting a head start. There was an operating kennel and another building that had been used in the past but needed work. It seemed like some effort up front would put us in a good position quickly.
We cleaned things up. We made it functional. We brought the second building back into use over time.
From the outside, it probably looked like a straightforward transition.
What it actually turned into was a slower process of understanding what we had stepped into.
Some of it was obvious early on. The drainage system, for example, was designed in a way that made sense in theory. There was a trough built into the floor, and everything was supposed to flow out cleanly when the rooms were washed down.
Except it didn’t.
There were cracks in it. Instead of doing what it was supposed to do, it allowed water and waste to move in directions it shouldn’t have, slowly working against the structure of the building itself.
That’s not the kind of problem you plan for. It’s the kind you discover after the fact, and once you find it, it’s yours.
Other things weren’t broken, but they weren’t right either.
The heating system works, but it was never designed for how the building is actually used. Air has to travel farther than it should, through a system that narrows at the wrong points. You can compensate. You can adjust the pressure and make it function.
But you don’t get away from it. It becomes part of your routine, something you’re always managing in the background.
There are smaller versions of that everywhere.
Spaces that technically work, but never quite feel like they were set up for the job. Our grooming room is one of those. It does what we need it to do, but it’s tight. There’s no room to set it up in a way that feels natural. Everything has to be arranged carefully because there isn’t enough space to do it properly.
None of those things stops the operation.
They shape it.
And then there are the parts that don’t change at all.
The kennel sits in a depression. You don’t think much about it until you start considering what comes next. Expansion becomes a completely different conversation when the building sits lower than the surrounding area. It’s not just a question of cost. It’s a question of whether it’s even practical.
Those are the kinds of constraints that don’t show up when you’re first looking at a place. They only become visible when you start thinking about what the system needs to become over time.
The Regulatory Layer
There’s another layer that doesn’t always get discussed: the regulatory side. And it’s more complicated than most people expect.
If the building use is already established, you’re not starting from zero. What exists may be grandfathered, which can work in your favour. Unfortunately, that protection is narrower than it sounds. It covers what’s already there. The moment you want to add a building or expand what you have, you’re navigating fresh approvals as if you’re starting from scratch.
Depending on your location, that could mean multiple levels of government. In Canada, a provincial road can trigger corridor management permits before you even get to the municipality. A new structure near a waterway or wetland may require an assessment by the Ministry of Environment. In the US, state environmental reviews can serve a similar function. The specifics vary by jurisdiction, but the pattern is consistent: the legwork doesn’t disappear just because the existing use was already approved.
None of that will necessarily stop you. But it takes time, it costs something, and almost nobody factors it in when they’re comparing a purchase price to a construction estimate.
What the Building Does to the Dogs
At some point, though, all of this comes back to the dogs.
It’s easy to stay focused on the building itself, its layout, its materials, and its systems. But the real question is how those choices affect behaviour.
Movement is one of the clearest examples.
In many facilities, dogs move through shared hallways. From a human perspective, it’s efficient. Everything is centralized. It’s easy to get from one space to another.
From a dog’s perspective, it’s something else entirely.
They see other dogs moving. They hear activity. They start to anticipate what’s coming next. Some get excited. Some get frustrated. Some begin to escalate before anything has actually happened.
When multiple dogs move through the same confined space, those reactions build on each other.
It doesn’t mean the system is wrong. It just means it creates a certain kind of environment that needs constant management.
If you design it differently, you can reduce some of that pressure. Not eliminate it, but reduce it. Changing how dogs transition between spaces alters what they experience, in turn altering how they behave.
The same is true for noise and airflow in your kennel.
If sound carries easily, one dog barking rarely stays isolated. Others join in until it becomes the baseline rather than the exception.
Airflow affects comfort, temperature, air quality, and circulation. If the system isn’t set up properly, those things become variables instead of constants.
None of this is dramatic on its own. But together, it defines the system.
It also affects how people work inside it.
If cleaning is harder than it should be, it doesn’t just take longer; it’s harder, and changes how it gets done. If movement between spaces is awkward, timing shifts. If visibility isn’t quite right, reactions are delayed.
Small things. But they don’t stay small. They accumulate.
What It Actually Costs For A Kennel
When people talk about buying versus building, they usually focus on upfront numbers. Purchase price versus construction cost, renovation versus new build. Those comparisons are useful, but they don’t tell the whole story.
We spent around $50,000 converting a Quonset hut into seven boarding rooms. In hindsight, we probably should have torn it down to the concrete pad and built new. The structure was there, so we worked with it. But retrofitting an existing building into something it wasn’t designed to be has a way of embedding compromises you spend years managing.
The hard truth is that we don’t know the cost. Renovation spending doesn’t work like a construction invoice. Materials are bought piecemeal, often alongside something else, and you’re not tagging each purchase to a specific project, so you can add them up later. By the time you realize what something actually costs, you’ve already spent it.
There’s a psychological side to that, too. When costs are spread over months or years, no single purchase feels significant. Eight hundred dollars here, twelve hundred there. None of it feels like a big number in the moment. A lump sum building cost feels expensive because it’s all in front of you at once. Renovation spending feels manageable because it’s spread out and blended. Same money. Completely different experience. And that difference causes most people to underestimate what they’re actually spending.
That said, the renovation path exists for a reason. When cash flow is the constraint, spreading costs over time isn’t a mistake. It’s a strategy. The alternative isn’t always a clean new build. Sometimes it’s no build at all.
The risk on the other side is overbuilding. I saw this often working in banking, dairy farmers building barns for three or four hundred cattle when they only had two hundred, assuming the herd would grow into it. In Canada’s quota system, that growth takes far longer than projected. The barn sits half empty for years, carrying costs the operation isn’t ready to support.
The smarter way to build new is modular planning. You pressure test the numbers first, then build for what you have, but you rough in the infrastructure for where you’re going. Water, hydro, the foundational systems. That way, when the capacity is there to expand, you’re adding rooms or going a different direction on the property, not tearing into walls to find out what you forgot to run the first time.
In our case, that option isn’t available. The front building sits in a depression, not because it had to, but because that’s where it was put. Bringing in aggregate to build up and site it properly on higher ground would have changed everything. Instead, the main building is in the low spot, the back building is on the hill where the front one should have been, and water running off that hill ends up working against the front building rather than away from it.
Neither path is automatically safer. They just come with different kinds of exposure.
The Honest Answer
There’s a part of this that’s uncomfortable to say, especially looking back. If I could do it over, I would build our kennel. That’s the cleaner answer, and in a different situation, it might have been the right move. But that answer only exists because of what we learned along the way.
We spent a significant amount upgrading what we had, in some cases more than it might have cost to do it properly from the start. But building wasn’t a simple alternative. It would have required more capital upfront, more time before opening, and a different kind of risk. Being able to generate cash flow early allowed us to move forward without taking on everything at once, and that made the difference at the time.
If the situation had been different, if we’d needed to be operational within a very tight timeframe or meet financial obligations immediately, the decision might not have been a decision at all. It would have been whatever allowed us to move forward.
And that’s where another option comes into view, even if it’s not the one most people want to consider. Sometimes the answer isn’t to move forward at all. Sometimes the better move is to wait, to build capital, gain more experience, and refine what you’re actually trying to create before committing to it.
That’s not always easy, especially when you feel like you’re close or when the opportunity in front of you seems like it might not come around again. But in some cases, it’s the decision that gives you the most control over what comes next, because you’re not forcing a system to work before you’re ready to support it.
Neither path is clean, and neither removes the need to think carefully about what you’re doing. Most of the trade-offs don’t show up immediately. They reveal themselves once you’re already in the system, working with it day after day in your kennel.
The mistake most people make is deciding too quickly which option is better. A more useful place to start is by asking what you can realistically support, how quickly you need the system to function, and which parts matter enough that you don’t want to compromise on them. Because whichever path you choose, you’re not stepping into something temporary. You’ll be working inside it for years. The clearer you can see it before you commit, the more likely it is that the system you end up with will be one you can actually work with, rather than something you spend years trying to reshape.