Cat Ledge

The husband asked me awhile back what I would like for Christmas. We are not very big into exchanging much between each other, we usually focus any gifts on family and friends first. This year I asked for his handyman skills to help with a problem in our office.

Working from home has been great, but alas, my office is not very big. All four cats prefer to be in the same room as me, which means we all pile into the office together. The crew argues over the small amounts of horizontal space available, piling into the favorite beds whether there is another cat in there or not.

I have an unused corner of the office though, where the desk is deep and there is no real way to reach the wall above it. So I asked him to put up a few shelves the cats could climb on to help create more room.

So the day after Christmas, I cleared the office, and construction began.

I originally planned on taking more pictures of the building steps, but I was not around for the entire construction process. So here are a couple I was able to snap in between steps.

(reminder: click on any photo for a larger version)

The plan had been to build smaller non connected ledges they could leap back and forth from, but the amount of studs in the wall to connect the shelves to proved to be lacking. So we ended up linking the walking ledge in with the two sleeping ledges for better support. Having two bouncing bengals playing on these shelves is always in the back of my mind.

We ended up putting support between the two sleeping ledges, as Asia is checking out above. I wanted the ledges large enough to put nice comfy cat beds on them, so we needed extra support for that depth.

Here is the completed ledge system.

I really like what my husband did. If you couldn’t see the carpet, you might say it was just a normal shelf on the wall.

There is a carpeted pole to the right that goes to the floor. The cats have a similar pole on a ledge in our family room, so this is nothing new to them. We wrapped the carpet over the top edge of the shelf to give them grip to get up and over. It is made of just two 2×4’s screwed together and then covered in carpet.

We put trim up around the shelves, and then carpeted the inner ledge. This pretty much hides the carpet when you are standing in the office, and gives the shelf a clean look.

Above you can see the carpet inside the walking ledge area. It is stapled down, but not so much so that I cannot remove it and change it out later on.

Above you can see the sleeping areas have been lined in carpet as well. I need to do a bit of touch up paint, and then will put one of their cat beds in this slot.

Bayou and Asia checking out their new digs. Asia spent the evening racing up and down the pole and picking on anyone else who attempted to go up or down. Officially its a hit.

Tagged as: bengal, cats