A kennel is one of those jobs that looks simple on the drawings and turns into a coordination puzzle the day you start laying out floor drains. It's a small building by square footage, but pound for pound it packs more MEP, more waterproofing, and more finish-sensitive sequencing than a job three times its size. You've got constant wash-down, aggressive odor and humidity, acoustic separation between barking dogs and skittish cats, and a client who has boarding reservations on the books before the epoxy has cured. The trades that will bite you here aren't the framers or the roofers. It's plumbing, floors, and HVAC — and the order you run them in decides whether you open on time or eat a month of rework.
This is a walkthrough of how to actually sequence and short-interval-schedule a boarding and grooming facility, from slab to opening day, with the buffers and inspection holds that keep the finishes from getting destroyed by the trade behind them.
Start at the slab, because the slab is the whole job
Ninety percent of the pain on a kennel job is designed and buried before you ever hang a stud. The floor in the kennel runs, the grooming salon, and the wash bays gets hosed down multiple times a day, every day, for the life of the building. That means the slab is not a slab — it's a drainage system with concrete on top.
Get your plumbing underground and your slab pours locked in first, and get them right:
- Slope to the drains is the number one callback. Trench drains or point drains in every run and wash bay want a real fall — plan for roughly 1/8" to 1/4" per foot toward the drain. If the concrete finisher screeds it flat because nobody told them, you get standing water and urine pooling in the corners of every kennel, and the only fix is grinding or a topping slab. Walk the slab with the plumber and the finisher before the pour and confirm the fall with a level, not with good intentions.
- Set the drains and cleanouts before the pour, obviously — but also set them to the right elevation for the finish floor. A trench drain grate that sits 3/8" proud of a troweled floor is a toe-stubber and a cleaning nightmare. Coordinate the drain top elevation with the flooring system thickness now.
- Rough in the trench drains and the grease/hair interceptor for the grooming salon while the ground is open. Grooming generates hair that clogs standard traps fast; a hair interceptor is cheap underground and miserable to retrofit.
Budget a real inspection hold here. Underground plumbing gets inspected and pressure-tested before backfill, and the slab pour cannot chase it. A one-to-two day buffer between "underground signed off" and "pour" is money well spent — it absorbs the inevitable red-tag on a fitting.
Build the shell so it can be sealed, not just closed
Once you're out of the ground, the shell sequence is conventional — structure, roof, exterior envelope. The kennel-specific note is that your envelope has to hold conditioned, filtered, slightly-negative-pressure air against constant interior humidity. Get the building dried in and get the vapor control and air barrier detailed correctly, because you're going to fight moisture from the inside for the next 15 years.
The framing gotcha is acoustic and plumbing walls. Dog runs need sound isolation from cat boarding and from the lobby, and the wash walls need to be built for tile or FRP over cement board, not painted drywall that will delaminate in a year. Frame those wet and sound walls to the correct assembly before rough-in starts — you don't want the electrician's boxes landing in a wall that has to grow a second layer of block or an acoustic clip channel.
Rough-in: the coordination bottleneck that decides your schedule
This is where a kennel earns its reputation. Every ceiling in the animal areas is crowded: supply and exhaust ductwork sized for high air-change rates, sprinkler, hot and cold water to every run and every grooming tub, and often a floor-mounted radiant or supplemental heat zone. Overhead MEP coordination is not optional here — run it as a real sequence:
- Ductwork first, because it's the biggest and least flexible. Kennel ventilation is designed for 10–15+ air changes per hour to control odor and disease, so the ducts are large. Set them, then let the sprinkler and the flexible trades (water, low-voltage) route around them.
- Plumbing rough second. Get water to every tub, every auto-waterer, every run, and — critically — pressure-test the domestic and drain lines and get them inspected before anything closes.
- Electrical and low-voltage last of the overhead trades. Wire is the most forgiving and the easiest to reroute around a duct or a beam.
Two rough-in rules of thumb that save kennel jobs specifically:
- Megger and test before you close any wall. Once FRP and epoxy cover a wall, opening it back up to chase a dead circuit or a leaking fitting is brutal. Confirm every run, every fixture rough, and every drain before the wall closes.
- Protect and pipe your odor-control and HVAC condensate now. High-humidity kennel air throws a lot of condensate; if you don't plan a proper condensate drain path during rough-in, you'll be chasing drips over the boarding suites after opening.
Hold a firm inspection buffer between rough-in complete and cover: 1–2 days for the framing/MEP inspections and to fix whatever the inspector flags. Trying to close walls the same afternoon the inspector shows up is how you end up cutting them open next week.
The floor system: the finish that everything else waits on
The kennel floor — usually a troweled epoxy or urethane-cement system with integral cove base — is the single most sequence-sensitive finish on the job, and it's the one people rush and regret. Two hard facts drive the schedule:
- Concrete moisture will fail your floor if you don't wait for it. Epoxy and urethane systems require the slab to be dry — commonly under a specified relative-humidity or moisture-vapor-emission threshold. A green slab gasses off moisture, delaminates the coating, and you're grinding it off and starting over. Depending on the mix and conditions, that dry-down can take weeks. Get RH probes in the slab early and track the number; don't let the coating crew start on a hope.
- Integral cove base ties the floor to the wall, so the wall base has to be ready. The cove turns the epoxy up the wall a few inches so there's no seam at the floor to trap water and bacteria. That means the wall substrate (cement board / block) at the base has to be installed and prepped before the floor crew mobilizes, and it means the floor coating and the wall finish have to be coordinated as one operation, not two.
Sequence the floor to go in after the messy overhead and wall work is done but before final fixtures and the kennel gates and dividers land on it. And then protect it — a freshly coated floor that a plumber sets a pipe threader on is a warranty claim. Ram board and hard protection until the trades that follow are genuinely done.
HVAC, odor, and the commissioning that can't be skipped
Kennel HVAC is a health system, not a comfort system. It's balancing high air-change rates, humidity control, and usually a slight negative pressure in the animal areas so odor doesn't migrate to the lobby. Get the equipment set and ducted during rough-in, but reserve real time at the end for testing, adjusting, and balancing (TAB). An air system that was never balanced will let the boarding wing smell like a boarding wing on day one, which is exactly the impression the owner is paying to avoid.
Coordinate commissioning against a hard predecessor: TAB needs the building enclosed, power permanent, ceilings closed, and doors and dampers installed. Sequence it so the climate systems are proven operational and stable before the first animal is on site — not the same week, which gives you no room to chase a balancing problem.
Cats, kennels, and keeping the barking on one side of the wall
Dedicated cat boarding is a genuinely different environment: quieter, warmer, with climbing enrichment and condos, and it has to be acoustically and mechanically separated from the dog runs. The failure mode is treating it as "just another finished room" and discovering at opening that dog noise carries straight through a shared wall or a shared return-air path. Handle it during design and rough-in — separate or acoustically-treated return air, sound-rated wall assemblies, and door undercuts that don't turn into a sound leak. It's cheap to build in and expensive to bolt on.
Outdoor runs, yards, and the two-track schedule
The nice thing about the exterior runs, play yards, turf, shade structures, and fencing is that most of it doesn't depend on the interior being finished. That's your relief valve. Run the site and outdoor amenities as a parallel track so your interior finish crews and your fence and turf crews aren't tripping over each other. Coordinate the two tracks so outdoor drainage ties into the same system you tested underground, and so the play surfaces get their own slope-to-drain — a flat outdoor run holds water and turns to mud and odor just like a flat interior one.
How to actually run all of this week to week
The master schedule tells you the kennel opens in October. It doesn't tell the epoxy crew that the slab RH still isn't passing, or warn the ceiling closer that the plumber hasn't gotten his drain inspection yet. That's what a short-interval, look-ahead plan is for — pulling the next three to six weeks off the master schedule and working out, at the crew and constraint level, exactly what has to be ready before each trade can move.
On a kennel specifically, a rolling weekly work plan is where you catch the things that sink these jobs: the drain inspection that has to clear before the pour, the slab moisture number that has to drop before the floor coating, the wall base that has to be prepped before the integral cove, the air balance that has to pass before animals arrive. Those are constraints, not tasks, and they don't live cleanly on a bar chart. Laying them out visually by area — dog runs, cat boarding, grooming, lobby, yards — and connecting the trade-flow handoffs so you can see who's waiting on whom is exactly the kind of coordination a tool like LookAheadWall is built to make legible for the whole crew, superintendent and subs included.
Build the shell so it can be sealed. Get the underground and the slope right the first time because you can't fix it later. Test everything before you close a wall. Let the slab dry before the floor. Balance the air before the animals show up. Do those five things in the right order, protect the finishes from the trade behind them, and a kennel goes from a coordination headache to a clean, quiet, good-smelling building that opens on the day the reservations start.