As you all probably know by now, I moved to a little apartment with a sleeping loft a couple weeks back. As you also already know, I have a rather senior cat who tends toward the scaredy side. Generally, Mischa just wants to be wherever I am when I’m home – preferably on me, but he’ll settle for near me if that’s the best he can do.

This presented a problem with the sleeping loft. He couldn’t climb the ladder, and I couldn’t easily carry him up and down without having to use a separate stepladder with a solid platform to stand on. I tried not bringing him up to the loft when I went to bed, but he would cry. And cry. And cry.

So my pal Blurrylens and I devised a cat ladder that even scaredy senior cats can use. It consists of two Ikea Tryggve shelves, cut in half, each held up with an Ikea Valter bracket. Total cost for this project was around twenty bucks. Oh, and the cost of getting my hair colored next weekend, because my walls are scary thin and the whole time I kept thinking everything was going to collapse, resulting in a new outcropping of grey hair!

shelves1

Mr. Blurrylens did the carpentry, I handed the spatial relations. The project took about an hour and a half. We finished up around 1pm yesterday, and I tried to introduce Mischa to the shelves. He was, of course, a scaredy cat. At bedtime, I carried him up the stepladder, feeling a bit defeated.

shelves2

This morning, though, around 5:30,  I awakened to the sound of little footsteps. I thought it might be a mouse – I suspect I have one in this 1920s house, not surprisingly. Then I realized it was Mischa, hopping up and down the cat shelves! Turns out he had to discover them in his own time. Now, he loves them – he’s been going up and down all morning.

You can watch the video of the cat shelves in action here.