I LOVE cat trees! Well, so long as they are wrapped with sisal, not carpet. My cats LOVE cat trees. We just finished a fairly large catio on our deck which needs furnishing. It has a ledge running around all sides at about 4’ so we wanted to make access via climbing posts. Gives good exercise and solves a practical problem. But never having done one, we procrastinated. And procrastinated! I think the sisal I ordered from Amazon sat around for almost 3 months. We finally started and finished it yesterday and I am thrilled that it turned out so good. Makes me wonder why we procrastinated so long!
We used a 4x4 wood post. We cut off 2’ and wrapped until we ran out of 3/8” sisal. The finished post is 5’ and some inches tall and took 200’ of 3/8ths sisal. We secured the ends with staples, the kind you have to drive in with a nail. We used some caulking type adhesive (not much). And we wrapped really really tight and used a hammer liberally to keep the strands close as we went and I must say it looks almost professionally done.
Now it needs a base and we can put it to use. Internet research suggests we need to use a large lag bolt, but it also insists that the pre-drilled hole must be laser straight or the post will tilt. We don’t have a drill press so we might need to figure out some other way to secure the post to a base. No matter what we use, multiple smaller screws or a big lag bolt, the pre drilled holes need to be drilled straight. Our next challenge.
We used a 4x4 wood post. We cut off 2’ and wrapped until we ran out of 3/8” sisal. The finished post is 5’ and some inches tall and took 200’ of 3/8ths sisal. We secured the ends with staples, the kind you have to drive in with a nail. We used some caulking type adhesive (not much). And we wrapped really really tight and used a hammer liberally to keep the strands close as we went and I must say it looks almost professionally done.
Now it needs a base and we can put it to use. Internet research suggests we need to use a large lag bolt, but it also insists that the pre-drilled hole must be laser straight or the post will tilt. We don’t have a drill press so we might need to figure out some other way to secure the post to a base. No matter what we use, multiple smaller screws or a big lag bolt, the pre drilled holes need to be drilled straight. Our next challenge.