Most things in this series can be replaced if you choose badly. This one cannot. A kennel build is concrete, and concrete is an opinion you are stuck with.
There is far less written about this than about grooming, and the international material is mostly American product catalogues. So this is what we have picked up walking Australian facilities and talking to the people who built them.
Water first, everything else second
Every recurring problem in a kennel traces back to water going somewhere you did not intend.
Smell is water sitting. Slips are water pooling. Disease transmission between runs is water travelling. Concrete cancer is water getting into the slab.
So the falls come first. Each run needs to drain to its own point, and the runs must not drain into each other, because a shared channel running the length of a block is a superhighway for anything infectious.
Grated channel drains along the back of the run, with a fall of about one in a hundred, is the common arrangement. Removable grates you can actually lift, and a hair and solids trap upstream of anything a plumber has to attend.
Then find out what your water authority says about trade waste. A boarding facility discharging at volume can sit inside trade waste rules, and this is a phone call, not a problem.
The floor
Sealed concrete with a proper coating. The workhorse. Bare concrete is porous, so it absorbs urine and holds smell no matter how hard you clean. A two-pack epoxy or polyurethane coating seals it, and the version you want has a broadcast aggregate for grip, because a smooth epoxy floor when wet is dangerous for staff and worse for dogs.
Do not let anyone sell you a domestic garage floor paint. It will lift within a year under hosing and disinfectant.
Rubber matting over concrete. Kind on joints, quieter, and it must be the kind you can lift and clean underneath. Anything glued down traps moisture at the edges.
Synthetic turf in outdoor runs. Same rules as the daycare yard: pet-specific permeable backing over a free-draining base, never landscaping turf.
Panels and gates
Pet Panels is the Australian manufacturer that comes up, building enclosures for boarding kennels, vets and breeders from Australian Duragal galvanised steel in an assembled panel system. DK Stainless does stainless fabrication. Both mean local supply, local replacement and no import lead time.
What to specify:
Solid dividers between adjacent runs, at least to standing height. This is the single biggest welfare and stress improvement in a kennel block and it is often value-engineered out. Dogs that can see and reach each other through mesh all day fence-fight, and it makes the whole block louder and more anxious.
Gates that open outwards, with a latch operable one-handed while you hold a dog and a lead. Then a second latch out of reach at the bottom or top for the clever ones.
No gaps at the bottom of gates. A determined dog gets a paw under, and then a nose.
Galvanised or stainless, never painted mild steel. Urine and disinfectant will eat paint and then the steel underneath.
Noise is the thing that stops facilities being built
If you talk to anyone who has been through a development application for a boarding kennel, noise is what the objections are about. Not smell, not traffic. Barking.
Treat it as a design constraint from day one, not as something to manage later.
What helps: solid dividers so dogs are not visually triggering each other, absorptive material on the ceiling of an indoor block, which is where most of the reflection happens, breaking the block so a dog cannot see the whole length of it, and siting the runs so the hard surfaces are not aimed at the nearest neighbour.
Acoustic treatment in a kennel has to survive hosing and disinfectant, which rules out most standard acoustic panels. There are washable products for exactly this.
An indoor concrete block with a hard ceiling is an echo chamber, and once dogs start it feeds itself.
Temperature
Australian summers are the harder end for a kennel and the one most facilities plan for. Insulation in the roof does far more than any active cooling, and it costs less.
Then airflow. Cross ventilation, high-level venting so hot air escapes, and shade over the western side.
Heating matters in southern states and for old and thin dogs. Radiant panels rather than blown air, because blown air moves whatever else is in the room around with it.
What we would not do
We would not build without checking the planning pathway first. Boarding is a use that needs approval nearly everywhere, and the rules on separation distances from neighbours vary enormously by council.
We would not use mesh dividers between all runs to save money.
We would not lay a floor without a proper coating and grip.
And we would not build the maximum number of runs the site allows. Facilities that are pleasant to work in and quiet to live near tend to have fewer, larger runs than the plan originally showed.
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