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Silly
is a little black and white cat. Her siblings are two
collies named Saul and Hannah. The collies love their
feline sister, and are intensely interested in everything
she does. They love to smell her, lick her, drool on
her, and play with her. Like a beach ball. Silly tolerates her canine
siblings up to a point, and someday in the not too distant
future she'll also have two additional sheepdog sisters
named Gracie and Georgie.
That's four
dogs. 16 big furry paws to dodge. Four slobbery
mouths to avoid. In order to preserve some portion of
this little cat's sanity, we decided she needed an upgrade
to her living quarters.
Premise:
Turn a stack of 1x2's, 2x2's, plywood, and carpet remnants
into a high-rise structure upon which the furry princess can
look down upon her subjects with impunity. |
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Taking Measurements |
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Before
starting any woodshop project, it's important to
have some idea of the dimensions you're going to
be working with. Silly is a fairly petite
cat, but how tall is a cat, really? Beats
me. I got out the tape measure and went looking for the cat.
After
returning from the emergency room, I superimposed the more pertinent
measurements on these stock Sillycat photos to the right. |
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| Requirements
/ Features |
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Must be
taller than a dog |
This serves two purposes. The most obvious is
to allow the cat some seclusion from the barking,
drooling masses. But secondly, a high platform
makes tasty cat food inaccessible by the
aforementioned drooling masses. |
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Multi-tiered, handi-capable accessibility |
We
thought to provide multiple avenues of ingress to
the main (dinner) platform. Silly is getting
up in years, though you'd never know it by the
amount of noise she makes catting around the house
at 4AM. Regardless, no platform is more than
12" higher than the platform beneath it. We also
included a central ramp so she can walk from level
to level. This should make things easier for
our poor old grey-haired cat in her retirement
years. |
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Carpeted, painted, suitable for a corner of the
living room |
Although Silly has her own room where she may sit
high upon her throne, this may not always be the
case. Our goal is to avoid building a
Homer Simpson sculpture, so if we need to move her
into a more trafficked area of the house, it won't
look too out of place. |
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Making Plans |
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Cat Condo Plans 1
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Cat Condo Plans 2 |
Once
we knew the basic layout of our cat, and
had a firm idea of what we actually wanted our
structure to accomplish, we drew up a set of plans.
There
are times when even the most meticulously drawn
plans have to be treated more as suggestions than
formal guidelines. The more impressive they
look, the less likely anyone will question a
missing wall here or there. Hang them up
somewhere close by and when someone asks you what you're
doing, just grunt and wave vaguely in that direction. |
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Construction |
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Cost
overruns and bureaucratic snafus plagued the
project from its outset. However, upon
completion, we managed to end up with a structure
that basically resembled our plans instead of
something wildly inappropriate like a windmill, or
a catapult.
Despite the fact that it bears some resemblance to
a
Rube Goldberg device, the construction is
simple. The entire structure is supported by
four legs. After determining the desired
height of the topmost tier, we cut two legs to
(basically) that length. The other two legs
only reached as high as the main level. This
was unanimously agreed to later on as a design
embellishment. |
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Page 2
- Cat condo construction continued ... |
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