I’m glad I was able to get work done on the cat isolation shelter today! I’m hoping to get more done tomorrow, too, but we shall see.
Next week, I won’t be able to get much of anything done.
On Monday, I’ll be taking my mother to a hospital in the city. Thankfully, she found the letter they’d sent her about the appointment. We now know that this test was something her previous doctor had written her up for, before he moved to another clinic. I believe that makes it more than a year, waiting.
I will have to go to her place quite a bit earlier, so I can go over the letter and figure out where we need to go. She’s supposed to arrive half an hour early, for time to register. This hospital is where the heart clinic is, but that part of the hospital can’t be accessed from the inside of the building. My husband and I had to go through the emergency entrance. Where my mother’s test is going to be will be in the main part of the hospital, but it can be so confusing to find places, they sometimes have volunteers available to act as guides and take you straight to the right place. Other times, we follow colour coded lines painted on the walls.
On top of that, this place is right in the middle of the city, across the river from downtown. I’m going to have to drop my mother off at the main entrance, find somewhere to park, then come back for her. With my husband, I often found myself parking blocks away, as the parkades were all full, as well all the nearest streets. I’ll need to factor in the time that will take, too.
It’s going to be an all day thing.
Then, a couple of days later, I’m taking my mother to an eye clinic, then the day after that, we’re bringing a male cat – whichever one we can catch – to the vet clinic to get snipped.
All that driving around isn’t going to leave much time to get things done at home, including working on the cat shelters.
It had been my intention to see if I could reinforce the mesh that is popping loose on the catio with the steel strapping I have, but I couldn’t find it. So no progress on the catio.
I got quite a lot of progress on the isolation shelter, though!
Here is a slideshow of things at the end of the day.
In between other things, I opened up the roll of 3/4 inch welder wire and cut off a piece to cover the back of the bottom level. At this stage, the mesh is held in place with a few staples. I’ll be covering the edges with wood lath to secure them, later.
I started cutting pieces for the lower level door/ramp to size, and prepared to cover the back of the upper level. I’ve decided I will cover the back first with some rigid insulation. It will probably get scratched up by cats, but that won’t matter too much. The sheet I was using today already has cat damage on it. I cut a section of insulation to size, and will then cover the whole thing with 4′ pieces of wood lath to secure it.
Once I measured and cut and prepared what I needed, I started painting, which you can see in the second photo. The first thing was to cover the edges of floor pieces that weren’t pre-painted, as they were not supposed to be exposed before I had to make changes to the floor plan. The scratching post/ramp to the second level got its ends painted.
In the next photo, you can see the pieces of wood lathe that got painted. Only one side of those need to be painted.
The pieces for the door/ramp need to be painted on both sides. I didn’t have room on the saw horse for all the pieces, though, so I found things on my work table that could support the door/ramp pieces as they dried.
The other thing I did was build the insulated cat “nest”. This is the box that is made to fit under the shelf on the second level. Once it was assembled, and the insulation secured, I framed the entrances for both the insulated and uninsulated boxes with pieces of wood lath. This is not just to them look more finished and pretty. We will probably be adding some sort of cover over the openings that will keep the weather out, and give a potentially frightened cat someplace cave-like for them to hide in. My husband has some leather that he will cut to size to cover the front. Part will be kept solid to be attached to the top of the opening, while the rest will be cut into strips that a cat can push through to get in and out.
I hadn’t intended to paint the cat boxes, but since I was painting things anyhow, I painted them, too.
Tomorrow, I will flip the things that need to be painted on all sides, including the boxes, and finish painting them, then continue working on the back of the shelter. I should be able to start adding wire mesh to the sides and front of the shelter, but not until after I’ve secured the scratching post/ramp in place, and then added anything else I can think of. Once the wire mesh is in place, Nothing more can be build into the bottom half, so I need to make sure I’ve done everything I want, first.
I still haven’t decided how to make the access panels into the top half, nor how to finish enclosing it. I really hoped to be find some clear plastic panels for parts of it, at least. Not just so we can see inside, but so any cats inside can sit in the sun and look out if they want. Plus, depending on how we position the shelter, it can add passive solar heat.
That is something else I want to make sure we can do – heat the upper half of this! I’d like to be able to hang a heat lamp off the frame somewhere, or even the centre support for the roof, and run the cord out the top somewhere. If we are going to have mostly feral cats isolated in there for a couple of weeks in the winter, we most definitely want to have a heat source of some kind in there.
That’s one thing about the clear plastic roof we plan to put on there. It will be thin, so it will have almost no insulation of any kind – but it can also be a source of passive solar heat on sunny winter days.
This whole thing is a complete experiment, and a learning experience, that’s for sure!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 