I love my little studio cats Mina & Coco. They’re growing fast and it’s been hard trying to keep them indoors. They are very curious, whiley cats. Mina has already taught herself to push down on door knobs. They want out, but I’m trying to keep them safe. We have future plans to build them a catio. But in the meantime, I thought why don’t we take advantage of the vertical space we have in the house and build them some cat stairs to use and hang out on?
I’ve always admired how cute cat stairs are. However they’re also super expensive to buy — I just can’t justify $100 per piece of a cat shelf / stairs setup. So why not try building my own? At this step Pinterest was my best friend. There were so many cute ideas online, though some of them were really unclear in terms of how they were properly supporting a cat’s weight. So take that as my advice to only use ideas online (including mine!) as a base idea, but it’s up to you to make sure that a structure is strong and that it is supported by studs in your walls.
My fave example, from Homedit.com
Normally I find sketching building ideas to be quite easy, however the space I had in mind had a few new challenges. First, getting the heights over widths correct — I wanted stairs that would both meet the second floor beam, and reach the second floor high window. (Note, the cats were already debating about jumping from this beam TO the high window, so these stairs would be a way to keep them safer than if they were attempting this Darwan-award level jump.)
The second challenge was that I wanted to use the corner area, which would also help is solidifying the whole thing. But drawing across three dimensions in this way was unique for me. It’s not like building a deck, where I can just focus on one plane at a time.
After a lot of research and a lot of sketching I found something I thought could work and we got to building! You should customize your design to your own space. Things to keep in mind: cats feel more comfortable climbing steps that are not too high or to smooshed, and this will change as they grow up, if they are currently young cats. We may end up changing the distance of the stairs if our cats get very large.
Materials we used: Screws Wood 1” x 8” , 1”x 12”, 1”x1”s , Saw, Drill, shelf supports ours were extras from Home Hardware, Scrap carpet pieces, or something you can use as grips for the tops of the wood so that it is less slippery for kitty feet.
