DIY: Homemade / handmade cat tree scratcher post

Hey guys

Me again!  Today I am posting photos of the stages we went through to build our very own cat tree! We have a bit of a "lively" kitty shall we say and as we are currently renovating and extending our entire house we don't want him to continue climbing and scratching our beautiful new home, we have even been holding off hanging some new curtains until this was done ~ please note that the curtains in the photos are not ones we were trying to protect, they are just temporary!

Kitty is a bengal cross and he certainly lives up to his breed of wanting to be as high as physically possible (and then some) to survey the land from up high.

We found a lot of cat trees online, mostly available in America so not any use to us, but felt that they were still no where near big enough to capture our boys attention.  Also, the couple of cat scratcher activity centre type things we have had have been really flimsy and just made from cardboard and he breaks them really easy.

We found he literally wants to be on the highest item / point in the room therefore it would have to almost touch the ceiling for it to be enough so that is what we did...yup, we put the first cat on the moon! (Okay, well 7ft is quite high).

Please bear in mind this has been made mostly out of scrap pieces of wood and OSB we had lying around with our home so I am sure it could look a lot more attractive than ours does but it certainly does the job all the same. The only things we had to buy were the metal brackets that hold the posts to the base and the metal brackets that hold the platforms up, carpet offcut, sisal rope (you will need a lot. We used 40 metres of 10mm sisal rope going up not even 6ft.) oh and some screws.

Stage 1:

Cat enjoying stage 1:

Cutting carpet to size:

Nail and glue gun the carpet to the posts and platforms:

Bottom half complete:

Cat enjoying it more at this stage:

And voila, the finished product:

I wanted to post this to show that you really can make our own things at a fraction of the cost shops charge for them and make them way more epic than anything that is available online. Our cat is loving this and he really does use it a lot.  The temporary curtains he used to climb and scratch are right next to it and *touches wood* he hasn't done so since this was completed.

Also, our boy is currently an indoor cat as there have been too many instances for my liking of kitty's being stolen in our area recently so we are hoping this will help him burn a lot of the pent up energy he obviously has to burn, so far so good.

I would love to read your comments below so please please please leave one to let me know what you think.

Robin Sparkles