The Catification Lady: Design - Before and After
One crazy cat lady explores the depths
of Cat Behavior, Catification, and Environment EnrichmentWhat to do? One of the classic questions I get is about what color shelves should be.
Vicki contacted us about her Dining Room. She wrote: "I have this area in the dining room that is the base for letting our four girls climb up to the 8' ceiling landing. But, it just takes up too much of the dining room and so I thought about attaching stairs and/or shelves, etc. to that wall so that it would free up the floor space."
The ceiling landing is above the door on the right. Vicki's hope was to use a combination of shelves and stairs to get the cats up. But one of her big questions was color. Her dining room table and chairs were stained, but the molding and chair rail were white. What to do?
I recommended she go with white for the shelves and stairs. While the brown stain would have looked fine in the room, I felt the white would look great.

And it does look great. The stairs lead up nicely tot he upper shelves
where the kitties can either get up to the upper shelves or on the
landing above the door on the right.

Here's two of Vicki's cats, Morgan and Mackenzi enjoying their new kitty superhighway.
"Just wanted to show that all the shelves are up and being used, by
at least two of the four cats. We are so glad that we went with all
white. Thank you for that advice," said Vicki.
"In the picture are Morgan and lower down, Mackenzie. Mackenzie never climbed anything, but she has made these shelves HERS! She loves sleeping way up top. We are so excited!" she said.
I'm excited too, Vicki. The layout uses shelves as steps so the cats can easily go up making for an awesome way to catify Vicki's home. The spacing looks good and there's plenty of shelves for all of Vicki's cats to find a place to call home.
And the best part, no more big cat trees that eat up all the floor space in Vicki's Dining Room.
What do you think about Vicki's design layout and the white shelves? If you have a design question, contact us at TheVerticalCat@yahoo.com or
773-642-6974
773-642-6974.