With a dollar store mat and a bit of scrap wood, you can whip out several of these DIY cat scratching posts and save your furniture from little claws.
Good morning sweet friends!
I have been AWOL this past week, but here’s why…
My home office built-ins are almost done!!
A few touch-ups, maybe some crown, paint the surrounding room, a bit more staging, and then I’ll share all the how-to’s.
I love it so much!!
In between building this behemoth, I’ve tried to whip out a few smaller projects so you wouldn’t give up on me and think I’m a slacker.
SO – another thing I have taken on – perhaps a little too impulsively – is fostering kittens for a local rescue. They come and stay with me for a week or two until they’ve been spayed and have had a bit of time to heal.
My first day as a foster I had 5 kittens, then I agreed to take their siblings so as not to break up the litter and I had 7. They went up for adoption and 9 more came to stay with me. Right now I have 7 kittens – 4 that are about 3lbs and 3 that are 1lbers (SO cute) that are staying with me until we get their pink-eye, cough and diarrhea under control.
Yes. Fostering is a bit more than I bargained for. 🤦🏻♀️
Odie (our 8 year old orange tabby) has been a civil host and has given up his old toys and scratching post to the newbies…. and they have thoroughly loved it up.
If you have a cat – which you likely do because you’re reading this – then you know that cat scratching posts and cat trees can be pretty expensive!
I picked up this 2′ x 3′ mat at the dollar store and decided to make my own (for them to destroy).
This mat is looped, so it will get pulled and wrecked before too long, especially with 7 rambunctious kittens, but at $4 CDN I don’t mind one bit.
Hey! I finally used my public school math guys! “The sum of the angles in a triangle is 180°”. Something to do with a hypotenuse or something?
I grabbed 3 pieces of scrap wood (mis-cuts from my built-ins), put two at a 90° angle to each other (perpendicular) and then cut the other board with 45° corners.
Roughly.
I glued these into place and held them with 1 ¼” pin nails until the glue was dry.
Ignore the pocket holes – those were part of the screw-up in my home office builds and I didn’t use screws to hold this together.
I thought about making a tall scratching post since they seem to like to climb it, but decided they also like to hide underneath things so a lower DIY scratching post would keep it from toppling over on them and give them a place to sneak attack from.
From here it was just a matter of stapling the dollar store rug onto the scratcher.
I did not cut the edges of the rug intentionally. It doesn’t look as pretty as finished edges wrapped tightly and tucked away on the scratching post but again, this is a very cheap rug with a loop to it, so anything I cut will unravel even more quickly.
I picked up some Natural Sisal Rope made particularly for cat scratching posts and tied it around very tightly. (Amazon affiliate link – for full Amazon affiliate disclosure, please see sidebar or bottom of the page)
I rubbed a bit of KONG Catnip (the best stuff ever!) into the rug and rope to get their interest – but I really didn’t need to… they LOVED it!!
And I was totally right about the hiding spot. This area became the vantage point for less-than-stealthy attacks on siblings. 😂
You can see from the back arch here that they dug their claws in full-force and went to town!
This didn’t even take 30 minutes to make and will hopefully keep these little claws from destroying any upholstered furniture.
I have a couple more “quickie projects” to share before the big home office reveal, but if you are looking for more pet ideas check these out:
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Simple, free-standing pet gate (dogs)
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DIY cedar dog house
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Concrete pet grave marker
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Plants and Pets – a list of toxic and non-toxic houseplants
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Simple cat ladder
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Catnip toy from old jeans
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DIY leash holder
I know you’re wondering “Did I cave and adopt one of my fosters?”
Yes 🤦🏻♀️ – Odie now has a little sister that the girls named Salem (but I call Cricket). In my defence, that’s just one out of the 23 adorable babies that came to stay – I’d call that willpower?
I’m such a sucker.
Happy Fall Y’all!!