Furniture Building, Cat Deck

I've spent most of the summer getting settled in with Jo in our new place (which used to be her place). I say our new place instead of Jo's place because she has made a huge effort in selflessly giving up her house to make me feel welcome and like it's both of ours. I can only hope I would be that selfless if the roles were reversed. Thank you Jo...

Part of getting settled in was the need to find a home for things. As a result my compulsive desire to organize things has shown its head on more than one occasion. This usually results in a comedy of errors, because the more I try to organize, the more complicated I make it, and the less organized I seem to be in the end. In my quest I converted the spare bedroom into an office / cat room. Here the cats can get away from the dogs, have some peace and quiet and a place to hide. Space was at a premium so I decided to combine office items and cat items. Here's what I came up with:

Book shelves on the top and hidden litter boxes on the bottom. Ingenious right! I built it eco-friendly from scratch using a recycled kitchen cabinet from Resource 2000 and pine 1x12's. Matching the stain on the cabinet doors was a killer, but I eventually got a good match.

Rusty and Jasper were never outdoor cats, but they do like to bask in the sun in the afternoon as long as they can escape to the indoors if the need should present itself. Here's a shot of rusty in action in my old front yard.

Being on the 2nd floor presented a bit of an access challenge to the outdoors so I solved the problem by building a miniature cat deck!

Pressure treated 2x4's make up the frame which is trimmed and railed with redwood pickets. A little astro-turf is as good as grass for the old boys.

The last thing I needed in the office was a place for the cat food that the dogs couldn't reach. I built this today, but it's not stained yet. It's well out of reach of the dogs and easy to access for the cats, although Jasper is a bit portly in his old age.

Overall Jo and I are settled in nicely and the boys are sleeping next to me as I finish up this post. Now I look forward to getting back to more daring adventures than building furniture with the neighbor kid in the driveway. Snooze...