For the love of a cat (who doubles as Houdini)

Miss Maggie
Since arriving at our new home in Whitefish, we have had a child gate installed on the stairs to keep the cats from going into the carpeted areas of the house.  (For those of you who have been reading this blog since its inception, you will know that we have two cats – Maggie, a 16-year old veteran who lords it over Josie, 2 years her junior.  Maggie persists with her dominance despite her advanced age and an obvious hitch in one of her hips.)  The gate is partly for our benefit (avoids the necessity to clean cat puke and other secretions from the carpet) and partly for Maggie’s benefit – we don’t think it’s good for her hips to use the stairs, and she is already at a low weight. 

Miss Josie





Despite the gate, we have discovered Josie upstairs numerous times.  It was a question for the ages.  Was she jumping the gate?  Squeezing through it?  Bumping the gate until the spring released? 

While puzzling over this, it occurred to us that maybe she was feeling restricted and bored.  (It should be noted that we were also finding litter on the black kitchen countertops each morning – she was clearly jumping up on them at night to get to higher ground.)  So, we decided young Josie needed a cat tree.  With time on our hands and the budget of the retired on our minds, we determined that we would build our own cat tree rather than resort to PetSmart.


The Web yielded a few reasonable ideas (for those with no fingers and all thumbs). 


We looked for a used step ladder at the ReStore, but no luck there had us in Lowe’s to buy our raw goods (and Spousal Unit gets all the credit for the measurements, etc. to make sure the thing would actually go together!)  Below are several pictures of the tree in progress.
In the garage

Ladder complete
Fabric added to platform

Platforms attached to ladder

Finished!
And I am pleased to say that Josie is using the tree – see below.


Linking to Mosaic Monday

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