Show me your Kitty Condos....

[gad5264]

I have been promising my daughters for a while now that we would build a kitty condo for their moms house when I was between projects and they were with me. I took the day off from work and went to pick them up so we could start working on it. We cut some ply and covered it with carpet and started building the house portion for the top. I am also sewing a hammock to stretch between the posts. I was just wondering if anyone else had built one of these for their house and if so would you post pics of it?

This is what we have so far? The 2X4's will be covered in carpet also.

[cabinetman]

I haven't built any kitty condos yet. I am planning to do a tree of some sort. In the meantime, my wife bought these I think at Pet Supermarket. They are a heavy nylon about 18" square with holes on three sides. They can be snapped together or used individually. They were cheap and our cats play in/around/and through them. We have four altogether.
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[thrytis]

Sorry about the poor quality of the photos. I don't think i ever took a shot of the entire thing, and the only pictures i had were 4x6 prints. This was over six feet tall, so the shots only show the top half. On the bottom was spot for a litter box, then a second level for their food and water dishes. A ramp went up from the dinning level to the house level that is visible in the picture. The first two levels were covered with stick on vinyl tiles, the lower columns were wrapped with rope, and everything else was covered with carpet.

I would suggest using thicker carpet rather than the thin stuff i used as it is hard to hide the seams with the thin stuff. Also, if you make an enclosed house, you should have a hinged top in case your cat tries to hide out there when it is time to go to the vet.

[stormdog74]

I would use sisal rope (cheap at HF) for the vertical sections - cats love to scratch sisal, plus the fact that having a carpet scratching post just encourages them to scratch the real carpet (for some reason they don't know the difference!).

Edit - I missed that the above poster said he used rope...should read more carefully!

[jackellis]

We've (mostly) solved the carpet scratching problem by a) having lots of other things around for them to scratch, and b) rewarding them with praise when the scratch the right things and scolding them when they scratch the carpet. Only one of five cats has ever scratched the furniture on rare occasions when we let them in the living room.

We have a store bought tree and ours just love clawing the thing to death.

[stormdog74]

We have been lucky too with almost all of our cats, but our newest (not so new anymore) just refuses to acknowledge our authority in this regard!