Pet access is far easier to design in than to bolt on later. Drilling a round hole into a finished, toughened glass door on site isn't an option — the glass has to be cut before it's toughened — so the cheapest, cleanest way to give a home pet access is to specify it at design stage. This guide is for the people who make those calls: builders, architects, joinery and window manufacturers, and developers fitting out multiple homes. It covers how Catwalk® and Dogwalk® doors go into both glass and solid doors, which model suits which opening, and how volume supply works.
Retrofitting pet access to a completed home is where the cost and the callbacks come from. A homeowner who wants a cat or dog door in a double-glazed slider after handover is looking at a whole new sealed unit, because you can't cut toughened glass once it's made. Specify the cut-out up front and that problem disappears: the panel is drilled, then toughened, then delivered ready to fit. On a development where the same door detail repeats across dozens of homes, designing it in once is far cheaper than fielding retrofit requests one at a time.
Every Pet-Tek glass-fitting door uses a single round cut-out rather than a rectangular one. A round hole spreads stress evenly around its edge with no corners for cracks to start from, so the glass is less likely to fail during drilling or over time, it's quicker to core-drill than to make multiple cuts, and it's simpler for a glass manufacturer to pre-cut and toughen for a double-glazed unit. That last point is the one that matters at spec stage — it's what makes designing a pet door into double glazing straightforward. The reasoning is covered in more depth in why glaziers prefer the round cut-out.
Where the opening is a solid door — timber, composite, PVC or metal — the wood-fitting range installs on site with no factory pre-cut. It suits panels from 5mm up to 52mm depending on the model, including tunnel versions that self-line a thicker door so there's no separate tunnel to cut. That flexibility makes it easy to standardise one supplier across a project even when the door types vary from build to build.
A quick reference for matching the opening and the pet to the right model and cut-out:
| Opening & pet | Model | Round cut-out | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glass, cat | Original glass cat door (G-CDC / G-CDW) | 245mm | glass 3–10mm |
| Glass, large cat / toy dog | Maxi Pet Door (G-SDD) | 267mm | up to 28mm (double glazing) |
| Glass, medium dog | Intermediate dog door (G-IDD) | 320mm | up to 32mm (double glazing) |
| Glass, large dog | Standard dog door (G-DD) | 385mm | up to 32mm (double glazing) |
| Solid door, cat | Wood-fitting cat door (W-CD range) | — | panels 11–52mm |
| Solid door, dog | Wood-fitting dog door (W-SDD / W-DD) | — | panels 5–52mm |
Not sure which tier a particular pet needs? The door finder maps pet size and installation type to the exact model, which is handy to hand a client rather than guessing at flap sizes.
Pet-Tek supplies the construction and joinery trade directly, in the quantities a project needs, with the spec information to get the detail right first time — model dimensions, cut-out sizes and glass or panel ranges. For a developer standardising across a scheme, OEM and white-label options are available so the door can carry your own branding or packaging. If you're speccing repeat volume, it's worth talking to the team early so the cut-out sizes are locked into your glazing and joinery packages from the start.
On the glass side, your glazier orders the panel with the round cut-out pre-drilled to the model's size, then the door clamps to the glass — no silicone-and-hope, and no cutting on site. On the solid-door side, your joiner or installer fits the wood-fitting door into the panel in the usual way. Either way the pet door is a specified component with a known cut-out, not an afterthought someone has to improvise around. Give the glazier or joiner the model and cut-out from the table above and the rest is routine.
Spec sheets, cut-out sizes and volume supply from a New Zealand pet door company designing pet doors since 1999 — 100,000+ doors a year worldwide.
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