A real-life journey of raising a giant breed dog in a small apartment

Welcome to The Blueprint

Whether you’re here to follow our story, find practical tips, download free resources, or learn what worked for us, you’re in the right place.

Everything you’ll find here comes from real-life experience raising a giant breed dog in a small apartment. Some lessons were learned the easy way. Most were learned through trial and error.

I Learned This the Hard Way

I had no idea raising a dog was going to be so much work.

At least in the beginning, it was.

I had no idea what I was doing or what I was supposed to be doing, since the Universe had made the decision that I was keeping Luna.

I didn’t know how the two of us were going to live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment together. Luna was already large for only being five months old, and she was only going to get bigger.

I didn’t have a plan for any of it. I was just going with the flow, so to speak, figuring we’d somehow settle into a routine as we went.

Except we didn’t.

Luna had no set schedule. She was getting into everything. If she could reach it, smell it, or touch it, it was fair game to her.

And then there were those paws.

She hadn’t grown into them yet, so she was basically a giant puppy operating a body she hadn’t quite figured out how to control. She would clumsily tear through the apartment, fall into whatever happened to be in her way, usually bringing half of it along with her.

She was constantly chewing on something. The couch. My shoes. My decorative pillows, which she could rip apart in a matter of minutes.

I swear Luna ate every pair of my favorite shoes, and some that weren’t.

There were days I found myself in the bathroom crying over another pair of shoes she had eaten, the corner of the couch she had chewed, or the last decorative pillow I had managed to save, only to find out I hadn’t actually saved that one either.

And it wasn’t just the things inside the apartment.

Luna was also going through leashes like there was no tomorrow. Every time I got a new leash, she would end up chewing through it or breaking it during our walks because she was constantly pulling on it.

I even switched to a harness my neighbor gave me.

Luna chewed through that one too.

Then my best friend, Mia, gave me one of her daughter’s dog’s leashes and harnesses. Her daughter’s dog was named Marvel.

I thought maybe these would work.

Luna chewed through the plastic buckle.

By this point, I was out of leashes, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to walk Luna.

Luckily, Mia showed up with a brand-new harness and leash. This time, there was something different about them. Instead of the plastic buckles Luna had managed to destroy, these had metal hardware.

They were KONG, and apparently, that made all the difference.

Luna hasn’t managed to destroy them yet.

The leash situation was getting a little better. Well…kind of.

I wasn’t entirely sure whether Luna was walking me or I was walking her. With the amount of pulling she was doing, I was pretty sure she was walking me at this point.

I remember thinking, I need to figure out how to get this dog to stop dragging me behind her.

But even if I could figure out the leash situation, I still had a much bigger problem waiting for me back at home.

The chaos in the apartment hadn’t stopped.

I still hadn’t figured out how to keep Luna from tearing my apartment apart. At the rate things were going, I was pretty sure that was exactly what was going to happen if I didn’t figure something out.

So I started researching.

And researching.

I wasn’t just looking up information about large dogs. I wanted to understand Luna’s breed specifically. I wanted to know what I was dealing with and why this enormous puppy seemed determined to chew, drag, knock over, and investigate everything in her path.

And somewhere in all that research, I started to realize something important.

Luna wasn’t being bad.

She was being a puppy in a space that hadn’t been equipped for a puppy her size.

Something else that was becoming abundantly clear was how many hazardous things Luna could potentially come in contact with, including things I would have never thought were hazardous.

Plants were one of them.

I never would have thought to research the plants I already had in my apartment. I didn’t know that some plants could be dangerous to dogs if they were ingested.

Luckily, Luna hadn’t started chewing on my plants. But when I checked the ones I had, I discovered that two of them could have been dangerous for her.

I could have just moved them somewhere higher, but I didn’t know how big Luna was going to get or how high she would eventually be able to reach.

So I decided to eliminate the problem altogether and gave them away.

As I began looking around the apartment to figure out what needed to be puppy-proofed, I decided to get down on all fours.

I wanted to see the apartment from Luna’s height and see the things she was seeing.

And that’s when I realized just how much I had been overlooking.

I thought I was looking around my apartment. I hadn’t realized I needed to start looking at it from Luna’s point of view.

That was the beginning of me understanding that raising Luna wasn’t just about teaching her how to live in my space.

I had to learn how to make the space work for her, too.