The cat shelves (in progress)

Did I mention the cat shelves Tim is building?

One of the things we wanted in a home (because we had this in the other one and didn’t want to go without, it’s so useful) is a cat room — an extra room where, if you’re having guests over or having a party, you can shove all the cats into it and they can hang out there with food, water, cat boxes, and a little something to keep them occupied… a cat tree. Or, in this case, a wall of cat shelves.

One wall in this extra bedroom is going to have a unit covering it entirely; here’s the beginning of the shelves.

Let me backtrack just a second. We pulled the carpet up in the closet in this room almost first thing. The plan is to tile the closet, and then keep the cat litter boxes in there (along with a couple storage shelves on which bags of cat food or containers of litter can be stored). At first we were going to keep the dogs out of the closet with a baby gate, like we do with the house we’ve just moved out of. But then Tim had a genius idea — and he cut holes in the wall at different heights, tying those in with the shelf he’s building, and then we can just keep the closet door shut and the cats can come and go as they please through their new little tunnels!

He’s going to use the carpet that he pulled up from the closet to cover a couple of the boards, essentially like a scratching post. And he bought rope for the same thing — we did that on the previous cat shelves, and the cats have all but torn that to shreds they love it so much. I wonder if I have a picture of the cat shelves from the old house…? Aha –

… that’s from when we first put that one in. The cats have just about torn that rope down since then, they’ve used it so much to sharpen their claws.

So, this is in progress… we still need the closet shelves done, and the tile put down there… as soon as we get that done, I’ll post an update of the finished room! Even though, as you can see, the cats aren’t waiting to use it.