The Boy Room

We have two cats, Henry and Schwa, who have a little private retreat in the attic for their business (food, litter, and a couple cat beds). There's a cat flap in the door, so they can get in and out and the dogs are excluded. We threw this room together a few years ago when we kicked the cats out of the Accordion Room (now our spare room).

But it's cold and drafty in the winter, and we have been wanting more solid walls in there for a while. This weekend, we decided it was a good time to work on that project, because Noel had the flu! And construction work when you are incapacitated with illness is So Much Fun.

Here's where we started yesterday:

(Actually, that is the room after I swept up the little bits of litter the cats had been tracking all over the place.)

You can see that the floor of this area, installed by the previous owners, is a pair of 4x8 sheets of plywood. We decided to confine the room to that space, because it was easier to manage construction that way.

After we took down all the chicken wire, we began with the back wall, and built a wooden frame around the room. Sensibly, we built each wall on the floor and tilted it up into place. Much easier than trying to built it in place.

We got the walls all in place yesterday night, but did not seal off the top between the rafters with chicken wire until this afternoon. It seemed like it might not be necessary until we woke up to an utterly filthy cat; he'd gotten up over the wall and was hanging out above the bathroom.

This afternoon we borrowed a stapler from our neighbor and got the chicken wire in place. Now the boys have a little room all their own that isn't too drafty. We have a moving wall over on the right -- we didn't attach it to anything so we can just open it up completely to check the roof -- and we have a nice big door on the other side to get to the other junk we have stored in the attic.

At some point I'm going to go in there and paint the underside of the roof and the walls white, so there's even more light. The cats have a little nightlight so they're not in total darkness, but light walls would help make it a bit brighter in there for them.

Also, we've been reorganizing the basement lately, and I think we might have cleared off enough of one shelf that we could bring it up here to put a few things on it. We don't like to store too much stuff in the attic because it has such extremes of temperature, but it'd be nice to have a place to put the cat food and litter. I'm sure the boys would also like to have a nice high-up cat bed in there, as well.

posted by ayse on 06/14/10