The Cat Play Place - For Casey the Cat

My girlfriend Kim got a cat like 6 months ago now [his name is Casey, pictured below], and about two months ago we wanted to get a nice "play place" thing so he can climb it and have something to do. I though we would pick one up from the store, but upon going to the pet store they wanted like $150 plus for one of the models that we wanted! I'm not going to pay that much for something made out of cheep wood and carpeted, so I decided to make my own.

My girlfriend and I sat down and talked about what we wanted this play place to look like, and upon a lot of talking we finally decided what we wanted. Lucky for us I took a drafting class and learned how to use a program called Pro Desktop, so I made up our design on it [pictured to the right].


I don't know if anyone cares, but I'll give a run down of the size of everything. In the top right had corner [where the tallest part of the cat play place is] is what we call the top perch, and it is 12" x 12" (12 inches x 12 inches). The 4x4 it's attached to is 4 feet tall. The rounded piece that is under the top perch is a 16" x 16" square that was rounded off on one side [I'll name it the middle perch]. Moving to the left, the smaller box is a 1 foot cubic box. The pole that is is attached to it is 30" tall (or 2.5 feet). Under the small box is the lower perch and it is 10" x 12". Now, right in the front, we have the bigger box which is 2' x 1' x 1'. The bigger box is only raised 1 foot off the ground. Finally it is all attached to a 2 foot by 3 foot piece of plywood.

After finalizing these designs, Kim and I were kind of lazy in starting to build this masterpiece for Casey. We probably spent 3 weeks thinking about it, and finally our local home depo had some 4x4's and plywood on sale, so we grabbed my truck and scurried over there to pick it up for a good price. All we needed was an 8ft piece of 4x4 and one sheet of plywood [4' x 8' x .5"]. I had some spare 4x4's around the house for the other pieces that we needed.

As soon as the wood was at my house, we immediately got out a piece of paper and drew out the best way to cut out the wood. If i find that scrap paper sitting around I'll post a picture later. I didn't take many pictures of us cutting the wood out, but there is not very much left of the 4' x 8' piece of plywood that we bought.

It did not take too long to cut all the pieces out. I used a jigsaw to cut everything that I needed. When the cutting was done, we had to nail all the pieces together [thats kim a couple pictures up hammering nails into the bigger box of the cat play place]

Hammering the plywood together was actually extremely easy, aside from finding the nails that we were going to use. After it was all nailed together, we then had to put the carpet on it. I thought that putting the carpet on it was going to be easy; however, it ended up being the hardest part. We probably spent the better part of 2 days stapling the carpet to the wood. It's much harder to pull the carpet taught and staple it than it looks! We carpeted the entire outside and the bottom of all the pieces. It actually came out a lot better, and bigger than I thought. It seemed smaller when I made the CAD drawing on my computer.

Now that all the carpeting was done, all that was left was to assemble it. We put the legs on first and then put it together piece by piece. When we were done, I brought it over to Kim's house and we put it in her room so that cat can enjoy it whenever he wants to.