A House for the Cat (Boxed in)

Part I.

    To start with, I found some disposed kitchen furniture, and brought home two cabinets of various sizes. I took apart the larger one and cut the smaller one to the necessary size. While dismantling the cabinets, I learned some new details about the technology of making the kitchen sets.

    The cut off top of the smaller cabinet was turned into an entrance to the future house, and the back wall of the larger cabinet was made into the missing right wall.  Apart from a couple of planks I'll come back to later, so much for free cheese (outside of a mouse trap)! I bought 8 square meters of the cheapest office-type bluish-gray rug. 6 square meters might have sufficed, but I would have to engage in some creative cutting in order to cover the house with only whole pieces of material.

    Vicky immediately realized that the house was being built for her, and indulged in sharpening her claws on everything she could lay her paws on.

    Among the other materials I had to buy were nails and metal brackets, locks and rubber legs, bolts and hangers, SYNTHEPON (synthetic winterizer), a plastic pipe and a rope. Further on it will be clear what exactly all that is needed for. What each detail was needed for will become evident further on.

    A cardboard pipe could, in fact, be used instead of a plastic one. At the store where I bought the rug one could obtain a very thick pipe-sized roll of cardboard with the rug wrapped around it. I could take it absolutely for free but due to the insufficient information the idea did not occur to me at the time.

    The future owner of the house was extremely excited about the whole process, intently observed every step and even tried to participate. So, the house “skeleton” was now covered with the rug, with two layers of SYNTHEPON used for padding at the top. Now I can comfortably sit on the cat house myself. I hung the front wall on the hinges to simplify the access to the house for the purposes of cleaning, padding replacement, etc. 

    Voila! The house is ready and passed the field tests. My excited Vicky crawled all over it and tried her claws on every inch. My boldest hopes came true - she seemed to be delighted about the rug covering. The colors on the photograph would not come out in the exact shade, so I scanned a piece of the actual rug. I hope your imagination will do the rest.

Part II. Down the tube

    An improvised “tree” for the cat is covered by the same rug material and extends from the floor to the ceiling. The top is affixed to the ceiling by the metal brackets while the basis stands on rubber legs. The shelves are also attached by the brackets. Since a screw put into a plastic pipe isn't too reliable, a rope is used to secure the junctions.

    REMEMBER: A HAMMERED SCREW IS MUCH MORE RELIABLE THAN A SCREWED NAIL ;-) 

    I took a long plank, affixed rubber legs to its corners and used it as a base for the “tree”. The trick here is to g‎et it standing on the base with both feet as close to the pipe as possible, causing it to bend about 5 mm. That's the best position for screwing the pipe to the ceiling: the rubber legs become so firmly attached to the floor, that even a strong side blow or kick wouldn't topple or break the construction and there is no need to drill the floor.

    Two shelves, marked by a wooden edge on the picture, were lined with SYNTHEPON. The other three shelves are simply half-centimeter pieces of wood wrapped in the rug material.

    For the whole evening Vicky would not come down to the floor except when practicing  jumping down from the shelves or leaping onto the tree with an obligatory touch of the ceiling. Having exhausted her playful mood, the tired and utterly satisfied cat cuddled on the fourth shelf, just above me and proceeded to observe me as I was creating this web page.

Part III – Reconstruction (3 may, 2005)

     We bought several tables for the room that hosted the "tree", so it had to be moved to another place. The last thing I wanted, was to drill new holes in the ceiling – so I resorted to a well-known solution, external screws. I had to sort out a lot of iron stuff before I found something fitting. But picking the screw wouldn't solve the problem yet – it was also necessary to find a way to affix it within the thick pipe. And this sort of pipes has no device that is able to hold a screw. That's why I went for a random pick of a more or less fitting size – and the rest was compensated for by an insulating tape. A plastic cover would break down under pressure, so I reinforced it with a – yet again – random 5-millimeter piece of iron. A prop was almost ready – but for the other end of the screw that remained loose within the pipe and unsteadied the whole structure. To secure this "other end" I took something round and size-fitting, drilled a hole in the middle and affixed the male screw with two screws of the female type. To protect the ceiling and stabilize the support, I glued 6 self-adhesive pieces of foam-rubber to a cover of a coffee-jar.

      If I had any doubts concerning the safety of the newly-erected structure, they evaporated within seconds after two wild cats attacked it with a vigour of a baseball fan grabbing at a World Series ticket. Three kittens joined their elders later…

Part IV – Renovation (11 august, 2007)

     The cat-house has been in use for 3,5 years, and in the meantime the number of our cats has grown, while their claws would get clipped with less and less regularity. That has provided me with a lot of priceless information. It turned out that short screws, binding metal brackets to the shelves, get slowly but surely knocked out of the shelves – and once it happened, no screw can be restored to exactly the same spot. The brackets sag under the weight of the jumping cats, and the foam-rubber pieces indurate under pressure and become useless. But the worst of all is the wrapping – this cheap rug withstands an aggression only if the aggressors' claws are clipped at least once a month. Otherwise, 4 cats with full-grown claws would tear the wrapping into shreds in no more than half-a-year.

     What to do? – To mend my ways, of course! I replaced the rug wrapping of the pipe with a sisal rope. The calculation is easy: the pipe length (260 centimeters) is multiplied by its perimeter (40 centimeters) and divided by the width of the rope (1 centimeter). It makes 104 meters, and about 10% is to be added to make the rope as tight as possible.

     Myself, I bought a whole skein of rope (300 meter), so I am not sure how much rope was spent in this case.

     I replaced the shelves with thicker ones (2 centimeters), the screws – with longer ones (3 centimeters). Besides I opted for more durable metal brackets. As for the shelves, I used a more expensive rug wrapping, with a warp and a felted back – and wrapped them from both sides. It's justified, because a cat, losing its position on a shelve while playing with its mates, would try to cling to some spot on the other (lower) side of the shelve in order to avoid falling down. A thick wrapping and 5-millimeter-thick brackets would allow a long screw to almost make all the way through the shelve, but without sticking out at the other side.

      Doing the wrapping is the most laborious part of the job: the rope must be stretched every time it goes around the pipe and tightened with a hammer after each 5-10 coils.

      I ran the rope's end under the previous loop, thus doubling the upper knot. It's not easy to do such a knot – therefore, undoing it would prove no easy task as well. Especially, after it has been reinforced with hot glue.

      The same glue served me to affix a rug wrapping to the coffee jar that was propped against the ceiling. The wrapping would provide a maximal connection between the jar and the ceiling without damaging the latter.

      Strange as it was, this time none of my cats took a slightest interest in the procedure.

This time my expenses were as follows:

(all the calculations relate to the first version of the structure, before the reconstructions)

Rug - 8 square meters x 10 NIS per 1 meter = 80 NIS

A Plastic Pipe  (3 meters) - 1 piece x 65 NIS = 65 NIS

Rubber Legs - 1 set (4 pieces) x 20 NIS =20 NIS

SYNTHEPON - 1 meter x 10 NIS  (1,7 meter width)= 10 NIS

Screws and Nails - 30 NIS

Locks- 2 pieces (25 NIS for a couple)

A Rope  (50 m)- 5 NIS

3 Hangers and 20 Metal brackets = 100 NIS 

Besides, I had to buy a couple of necessary instruments: a Glue gun cost me around 30 NIS, and a file - 40 NIS

P.S. The currency, mentioned throughout these articles, is Israeli Shekel. According to the current exchange rate, 1$ = approximately 4,4 Israeli Shekels

P.P.S. For those who have some spare time and ‎speak foreign languages which these articles haven't yet been translated to : I would be very grateful if you could do the translations. Besides, if you find errors in the articles, do me a favour by helping me to get rid of them

You can comment it here: http://dandrey.livejournal.com/8816.html

Recommended links:

A Toy for the Cat (real)

A Mouse Under the Sofa (real)

A Bed for the Cat (real)

Best regards.

(5 April 2004)

Another projects