We have three kitties. They’re indoor-only. This creates a bit of a challenge in a house the size of ours… especially considering that we have a dog who thinks everyone wants to be his friend and play with him.

An early decision before we even closed on our house was to make one room dog-free and one room completely pet free. We’ve had occasions when we’ve had friends who were mildly allergic to pets find themselves very unhappy when spending the night at our place. It’s also nice to have a room to go to for various projects and not have to worry about the cats getting into everything… especially straight pins, which they have a strange fascination for. I guess it’s because they’re small and shiny. Yarn is a problem too, cats and balls of yarn are cliche for a reason.

So our “guest room” (3rd bedroom) door will stay closed… just as soon as it isn’t filled to the brim with boxes. The dog-free room is the “office” (2nd bedroom). That’s where we feed the cats and where we have the litter boxes set up. To keep the dog out we employ this baby gate:

It has hinges and a (somewhat aggravating) latch, so we humans don’t have to be experienced hurdlers in order to enter and exit. To make it easier for the cats, we cut a hole in the hallway linen closet:

Can you tell Pollux is still pissed at me for grabbing him by the ruff and stuffing him in a cat carrier during the move? Good thing he’s all hiss and no bite… Anyway, the hole is on the second shelf from the bottom, so Loki can’t really get to it. It leads straight into the closet in the office…

… where we keep their food dishes. We’ve removed the closet doors since we want this space to be open to the rest of the room anyway. We also have their litter boxes in the room:

We keep them pointed at the corner so that the gleeful kicking of kitty litter is limited in distance. This is a temporary solution for now. We’re planning to build a custom box with a switchback (to prevent projectile litter) and a hinged lid just as soon as we’re done building our bed frame…

We also have this cute little cat tree that we nabbed on clearance a few months ago.

(Unlike Pollux, Castor likes having his picture taken. Sorry for the weird lighting little dude!) We’re undecided as to whether we want to leave it in the office or bring it out into the living room. on the one hand, we want to provide the cats a comfy space without having to deal with the dog. On the other hand, when we’re out in the living room, the cats generally are going to be out there too. We’re leaning towards eventually building some shelving along the living room/dining room wall and making it pretty cat-friendly, so probably the cat tree will stay in the office. I guess we’ll see what happens when we actually set up the office furniture…

I’m just including this picture of Callie since this is a post about the cats and I didn’t want to leave her out. 🙂