As you all know, just from having seen previous photos in this blog even if you don’t know me, I have cats. Two cats, Dante and Chaucer. And they are fuzzy and wonderful. But they also like to climb things. Bookcases, dressers, people who stand still for too long… and, of course, their cat tree. This is an object I built five years ago, when I first got Dante and had access to the sculpture studio at college. It was functional… but fairly ugly. To the point that I had to do a lot of searching just to find this photo of it, because every time I’ve taken a shot to show off the new house, I’ve moved the cat tree out of the shot. So forgive the ridiculous messiness of this photo – it was taken on moving day, when the cats were confined to the guest bedroom so they wouldn’t escape.

So then I saw this cat tree online that a guy built, starting from an IKEA Stolmen post – it’s a modular closet shelving system, but the important thing is that it uses a sturdy vertical pole, held in place mainly by pressure between the floor and the ceiling, and you can buy brackets to attach shelves to it, at whatever height you choose. So I took the idea of a series of platforms, deciding on two big ones for lounging, and four little ones for traveling between the big platforms. Continue reading →