Stairway to Kitty Heaven

(Read the whole story at Cassilhaus blog)

So Jaco and Joni had been driving us crazy to go outside and we really are adamant that they can’t be outdoor kitties because of the hawks and coyotes in the adjacent woods so we have taken to leaving them out on the screened porch which they love. We have talked for a while about figuring out a way to put a cat door out to the porch but the porch is directly adjacent to a solid wall of kitchen cabinets.

Ellen had the idea of cutting a hole in the back of one of the base cabinet drawers and then penetrating the stucco wall on the other side and just leaving the drawer open when we wanted them to have access to the porch but I was pretty dead set against cutting the stucco wall. We took to letting them go through the kitchen window by jumping up on the counter and then out to the chair storage unit but a) we were not wild about them being on the counter (particularly Ellen!) and b) when winter came we didn’t want to leave the window open for them. I got to thinking about ways to get them passage to the porch and I hit upon the idea of coming through the ceiling. In an earlier post I detailed a cat spiral staircase project we did in the dining room that they love and spend alot of time on. A quick look at the architectural plans led to a location in our master bedroom closet that was precisely over the most logical spot for the cats to descend another spiral stair-simple enough in theory…