Adventures in cat furniture

Late last year we built a cat walk on the front of the house, and had cat doors installed for it and the catio at the other end of the house. Shula loves the catio, but the cat walk (really, just a 1.8m long, low cage in front of the window), never really interested her that much.

I saw this IKEA hack to turn a very large Kallax bookshelf into a cat tree, and thought we could try something like that. I later thought that if we put it in front of the cat door to the cat walk, it might encourage her to use it. But all I really wanted in the first instance was to give her some enrichment, and another thing to play with and look around.

I drew up a plan and Doug made it. It’s been ludicrously successful. Shula was all over it during the construction, and as soon as it was in place, was keen to explore all the possibilities. Best of all, she now goes in and out of the cat walk quite happily, whether we’re out in that room or not.

This is the plan I created:

There are multiple ways for her to get to the cat door, and there’s a shelf across the window behind the unit that lets her walk along it from the first level from either cubicle. The steps thing in front of the unit which you can see at the bottom of the photos was what Doug built for her to access the cat walk originally. She doesn’t need it, but it’s covered with mats she can use to scratch on. We put similar mats on one side of the top shelf, and a little way down the side (you can just see them in one of the photos), which she can use for scratching if she’s on the top, or on the cat tree next to this unit.

It was surprisingly easy to make with a jigsaw to make the holes – the thick top shelf is basically just melamine-covered cardboard, and Doug says he wishes it’s known that, because he would have used a Stanley/craft knife to make that one hole. (The other shelves are melamine covered chipboard, so you need a saw.)

You don’t have to have a cat door to the outside for this to be fun for your kitty.