I love my puppy, but wow… she is infuriating! She’s only just begun teething and she has already managed to chew through a significant amount of our timber furniture. I’ve tried training her out of it. I’ve given her chew toys, I’ve given her bones and I’ve put gross tasting spray on all the wood, but it hasn’t worked. I’m sitting at my kitchen table right now, and I can see bite marks and splintered wood almost everywhere. She’s gnawed at the legs of each chair and the table, and it is embarrassing when people come over and I have to explain that they hopefully won’t get a splinter.
From the research that I’ve done, she will be teething for another couple of months. By my calculations, I won’t have any timber furniture left at that point, which would be a disaster because that’s the majority of furniture that I own. I’ve decided that over the next couple of months, I will build new furniture to replace the old furniture when the time is right. I won’t bother replacing it before she finishes teething, because my hard work will be ruined, but I definitely don’t want to go without furniture when this is over. Last week, I went and bought plenty of timber supplies. Around Cheltenham, there’s a couple of pretty good hardware stores, so I imagine I’ll be frequenting that area over the next two months but hopefully I won’t have to once the teething is over. I’d be so mad if she got into the habit of chewing furniture. She will definitely be trained not to do that.
When I visited the local Hampton area hardware store, I decided to talk to some of the people working there and tell them what I was doing and why. Apparently dogs chewing through wooden furniture is a pretty common thing, and that they can show me how to build specific furniture if I need. This was quite a relief, actually. I was nervous that my dog was going to be a bit of a nutter. I’m glad she’ll grow out of it.