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.
I'm in general pretty open to wild ideas but even I got a bit into this project and had a "what was I thinking" moment. It was truly a massive undertaking. Ellen and I engaged our dear friend James again who helped us with the last porch project and we dove in. After pulling up the carpet in the closet we drilled a test hole in the floor and hit steel (which we knew was near our drilling location but not exactly where)-Yikes-a structural bracing member.
We had to move our planned penetration location West which meant the cats might have to do a little inside-the-floor-joists travel to get to the hole in the ceiling of the porch. And our house has no normal interstitial space-it is about two feet thick with large trusses at that point and 18" of dense pack celluslose insulation. We cut the floor and filled two gigantic contractor trash bags with insulation.
We wanted to maintain the thermal barrier as much as possible so we built a box in the truss layer that we could tightly pack all around with insulation. With all the trapezoids in the house it seemed fitting that the box turned out to have to be trapezoidal to fit within the trusses and avoid the steel.
Over a period of three days we cut and trimmmed out the hole in the cedar ceiling of the porch, built and painted the inter-floor box, and fabricated a heavily insulated upper box for the cats to come up into that had a swinging insulated cat door. James has just finished architecture school so we had two architecture grads working on the design of these boxes. We had to adapt as we went to make it fit with the existing closet constraints. After the first two days we made the hole in the floor signficantly larger after watching the cats come through. They were great beta testers for all aspects of the project (provided there were snacks at their destination.)
I did quite a bit of research on the cat door itself-who knew there were so many options? Settled on this one from Freedom Pet Pass. It seemed the best balance of cost, build quality, and insulative effectiveness and they offered a plexiglass blocking panel when we don't want the cats to go out at all.
We weren't entirely sure that Jaco and Joni would take to this scheme. After we assembled the spiral stair case below we put them at the bottom and they seemed to want to turn the wrong way. We quickly figured out that we had configured it with a counter clockwise spiral and the existing one in the dining room was clockwise so we reconfigured it and poof they were zooming up and down.
We had to work finding the precise distance from the ceiling for the highest platform but once we found it they gingerly made their way up through the hole and the steps inside the inner box and up to the floor of the closet.
After we got the upper box in place we realize it would be pitch black when they were making the rather contorted transition to the stair below so I found some great battery operated motion sensor lights called Mr. Beams that work like a dream. Now whenever they come from either above or below the light comes on as soon as they get near the holes.
They both go back and forth seamlessly now and I have to say the project is an unqualified success and we have two very happy kitties. Some of us were tired when we finished too.
How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven. - Robert A. Heinlein
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