Pet Concerns
Cats can enjoy playing in high-rise structure, including how to make feline playground, diagrams, materials, plywood and carpeting.
Even cats can enjoy high-rise living.
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By Connie F. Toombs
My cats, Dusty and Zing, spend hours climbing, scratching, and playing hide-andseek in my house every day. They amuse themselves on—and in—their own 5'-tall, carpet-covered kitty condo. Their favorite place to nap is in the penthouse.
The kitty condo takes only a few hours to build. A saber saw or jigsaw makes cutting the floors and doors easier, but you could do the job with hand tools. Material requirements are small too: a 5' cardboard tube between 14" and 16" in diameter, about 3 yards of scrap carpet, and 16 square feet of 5/8" or 3/4" plywood that's at least 2' wide. To assemble the kitty condo, you also need construction adhesive, carpenter's glue, a generous handful of U-shaped tacks, and a 1/4" X 1 1/4" bolt and T-nut.
Cardboard Tubes
There are at least two good sources for cardboard tubes. Sonotube, a cylindrical form used for poured-concrete piers, is available from concrete contractors, but the minimum purchase is usually 10' to 14' . At about $4 per foot, you'd have to find friends to go in on the purchase, or sell one or two extra kitty condos, to justify the expense.
Cardboard barrels, used to hold sweeping compound, are an alternative. You've probably seen at least one such empty barrel serving as a makeshift trash can. It may take a couple of dollars to pick up a pair, but that's still less expensive than buying 10' of Sonotube. Be sure to get the smaller size, which is 15 1/2" in diameter and anywhere from 19 1/2" to 25 1/2" tall. The barrels should be stripped of their metal and glued and duct-taped together.
The doorways are 6"-diameter holes placed in the center of each of the four stories. Find their positions by dividing the height of the tower by 8, positioning the first hole that distance from the bottom, and placing the others twice that distance apart. For example, if the condo is 48" tall, place the first hole 6" above the bottom, the next 12" above that, and so on.
Cut the Plywood
First, cut the 2' -square piece of plywood that forms the base. Then measure the inside diameter of your tube, and mark five circles of that diameter on the plywood. You can get five plywood disks up to 16" in diameter from the remaining 12 square feet of plywood, as long as you stagger their layout. Cut the disks out, and trim a 3"-radius semicircle from the edge of four of them. These openings will let your feline friends move up and down inside the condominium. The fifth disk will be the bottom floor, so you need not saw a semicircle in it.
