A cat ladder

This is Findus:

Findus is a cat. He is a cat of a certain age, who lives alone with his adopted grandmother. He is also the one true love of my partner. When we count up the photos she has of me vs. him, he usually wins. I like Findus, but I don’t really have much choice, because otherwise there would be Consequences for the Relationship.

Findus is getting on in years and growing out in girth and has some back problems. Since he is an outdoor cat, he needs a way to come and go at will, and his previous way of doing this seemed to be hurting his back. Since his grandmother is not always home, or awake even when she is, she also needs a way to let him out and it that doesn’t involve leaving a ground floor entrance open.

So we decided to remedy this situation. In June 2023, we built him a cat ladder. We are not the first people to do this.

We built him a cat ladder up to a second-floor balcony, where there is a door that can be left open for him to come and go as he pleases. It looks like this:

My partner spent a while looking at designs on the Internet, of which there are many. But given the constraints of space and the material we had to work with, we decided for a simple alternating-side design that allows Findus to snake up and down to the balcony like a champ.

The step design is pretty simple: each step is screwed to a couple of joists, which are themselves screwed to an existing post standing between the porch and the balcony.

There isn’t enough room behind the post for a cat (or to drive screws without a special angled head), so we set the steps asymmetrically, with most of the surface away from the pole and the wall. We thought about angling the joists or otherwise reinforcing the joint, but even a heftier cat does not weigh that much and so we kept things simple.

If we were building this again with fewer constraints, we might put more space between the steps, because Findus seems a little cramped, but it would have been tricky. There is a rail attached to the post about midway up which gets in the way of the alternating design, and a different spacing would have made it awkward for him to get around it.

Nevertheless, a year later, there are plenty of scratches on the steps, showing it’s been seeing good use:

And here’s our hero on the day of construction, posing like he made the thing himself:

That’s 3-0 to you, Findus, just in this post.