Cat Shelves

Here's a quick, easy project for all you feline fanatics out there.  Cats need a place to jump, climb, and scratch, and if you don't give it to them, they will jump, climb, and scratch all over your furniture.  We recently adopted a new kitty, and to welcome her to our home I decided to build a set of "cat shelves" (for lack of a better word), to give her a place to climb around in our living room.

The idea is rather simple, and I didn't think of it on my own.  There are plenty of examples of this sort of thing floating around the internet, I just adapted it to the available space and decor of the room in which I wanted to install it.

I made the shelves out of inexpensive 1"x8" pine boards that you can pick up at any big-box hardware store, or if you're like me, you might even have some lying around in your scrap lumber pile.  I measured the area, put my design down on paper, and cut the boards to the desired lengths.

Next I pulled out a router with a Roman ogee bit to add a little decorative detail to the edges.  I made a couple of passes around the three exposed edges of each board, and then went over the whole board with 220 grit sandpaper to prepare it for painting.

I painted the bottom face as well as the three routed edges, first with primer, then with two coats of flat white interior paint.  Once the paint was dry it was time to install the carpet for the top of the shelves.



I stopped by a local carpet store, told them what I was doing, and asked if they had any remnants they could sell me.  Instead they showed me some scrap they had lying around and told me I could take what I needed from that, so the carpet cost me nothing.

I cut the pieces I needed with a razor blade, and trimmed them up with scissors.  I used Liquid Nails to adhere the carpet to the pine board, which I may have done differently if I had it to do over again.  The Liquid Nails bonds excellently, but it has a seven day cure time, and stinks of solvent the whole time it is curing, so it delayed me bringing these into the house for longer than I had planned.

As for how to mount the cat shelves on the wall, I left the decision up to my wife.  She picked these decorative brackets from Amazon, and I think they compliment the room excellently.  It's important to take one's time and use a level to make sure the shelves are mounted in a visually appealing fashion.


In addition to the shelves, I also added a "climbing wall" to the area.  I had a couple of 2'x'2 carpet tiles lying around that I cut into sections and mounted to the wall by using drywall screws through the carpet and into studs behind the drywall.  The cat can then climb up the carpet on the wall to reach one of the platforms.  This provides her exercise, as well as gives her a chance to scratch something other than the furniture.


I hope you've enjoyed this short but entertaining project.  Hopefully it will inspire some of you to build your own cat-play-area.  If you have any questions about adapting this design to your own space, please let me know in the comments below.  Thanks for reading.