Cat Perches Continued-Renovating an Older Perch/discussion, plans, photos

Hi Everyone,

When we got our cats Biscuit and Rhubarb it didn't take long to realize that these two were the feline equivalent of a wrecking crew. They clawed and chewed and engaged in general mayhem with just about everything in the house. And they were just kittens at this point! What we needed was a big cat perch that they could claw and play on. And so my son Critter and I build on for them and for the last 3 1/2 years it worked well.

It stands in front of one of our living room windows so the cats can watch the birds at the bird feeder outside and it's held up fairly well. They play on it all the time and it's received a lot of heavy use.

Here is the cat perch at present:

I've rebuilt it 4 times over the years and now it's time for a total remodel on it. It's really dirty and completely coated in cat fur-see the next photo:

So the plan is to remove the old carpeting, clean and assess the underlying structure, and stain it with some exterior solid color wood stain and then haul it back indoors for the cats to resume their lives with.

So I spent several hours this afternoon pulling off the old carpet-wow, was it dirty!-and removing the staples. Nice weather outside today and of course I had the "foreman" keeping me company:

And here it is stripped down to bare wood. The underlying structure is still sound and strong so I'm just going to leave it alone and proceed with cleaning it and staining it:

And so just as I began to get ready to stain it, I put the foreman back in the house so he wouldn't get into the stain. He saw his beloved perch outside and began crying and running back and forth and generally had a huge upset over not being able to get to the perch:

With him inside, I started staining away. I used Behr exterior solid color wood stain. It's really thick and it fills in cracks and other problems in the wood. I used this color because I thought it matched the cat's fur really well and because, well, I couldn't find wood stain in wild purple. Oh well, perhaps the next perch:

Now I'm going to leave it outside to dry and bring it in late tonight. I'm going to go and shop around for a small scrap of carpeting and just apply carpet to the two upper decks, the center deck, and maybe the bottom if I can find enough. So drop by later this week for the finish photos.

Stay tuned,
VW