How To Make A Snoopy Doghouse Out Of Cardboard Boxes

My love of all things Snoopy was the inspiration behind my Snoopy and Peanuts themed Christmas tree this year. Repurposing a couple of cardboard boxes, I created a miniature doghouse for my Snoopy display.

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The top of my credenza is filled with many of the Snoopy items that have been given to me as gifts throughout most of my life. I decided though that it needed a replica of Snoopy’s doghouse to finish it off.

This doghouse needed to be small enough to fit on the top of the credenza – and not cost a lot of money.

I knew the best option was probably out of cardboard and thankfully I already had several small boxes on hand from Amazon deliveries to work with.

The outside of the boxes were covered in heavy tape that I couldn’t get off so the solution was to use the inside of the boxes for the outside of the doghouse.

I used two different sized boxes for this project. One of them was a perfect square to use as the base of the doghouse, and the second one had the wide sections for the roof peak.

For this project you will need two cardboard boxes, X-Acto knife or blade, ruler, red spray paint, a black Sharpie marker, packaging tape, and hot glue.

I started out by opening up the smaller square box on both ends to be able to cut off the flaps. I cut the flaps off one end but only the longer of the two flaps on the other end.

The two smaller flaps were needed to create the roof pitch.

After opening up the entire small box to lie flat, I used a ruler to find the center point of the shorter flap and created a triangle roof pitch with a pencil to cut out using the X-Acto knife. If you have a good pair of scissors those would work too.

So the cardboard box now looks like this right before I used a can ofRustoleum Spray Paint in Red Apple Gloss to transform it.

The cardboard took 3 coats of spray paint to fully cover it to make the doghouse.

In the cartoon strips, Snoopy’s doghouse has black lines drawn to show the boards of the doghouse. To create the same look, I measured equal spaced sections across all of the pieces of cardboard and then traced the lines with a medium tipped Sharpie.

The door to the doghouse was drawn using a small bowl for the rounded top and the ruler for the straight lines. This was colored in with the black Sharpie but black acrylic paint would have worked as well.

While making this adorable little Snoopy doghouse, I was very conscious of the fact that I would have to store this thing away with my Christmas decorations at the end of the season.

So of course I didn’t want to worry about crushing it or it taking up too much space in the storage boxes. Instead, I made sure it still could fold up like a box when the holiday was over.

I was going to use hot glue to put the sides of the box back together to form the square base of the doghouse.

However, the packaging tape was better to not only hold the shape of the doghouse box but would allow the box to fold flat when not on display. Packaging tape is flexible enough to allow me to collapse the box at the end of the season.

I created the roof by using two longer sections of the second box. This also required that I cut them out separately so they needed to be glued together or something to create a peak.

At first I did try to use the hot glue but it was a mess and the two edges of the cardboard were to thin to actually glue together.

In the end, I attached the two pieces together with more packaging tape and just placed it on top of the smaller box as the roof – without gluing it down.