Kitty Sky Bridge part one

What do normal people do on snow days? LOL

I start building the sky bridge to connect two sections of cat shelves. Jackson Galaxy says, the Kitty Superhighway should have no dead ends. So I've been meaning to make a bridge to connect them for a long time, but needed supplies to make it with.

I managed to wing it (well, one section of it) with what I had on hand (having bought four of the ceiling hooks earlier for this purpose). This is how I've built most of the cat shelves: broken bookcase + shelf liner + screws I already had. I bought brackets and two feet of runner carpet and made a dozen shelves.

The goal is to connect these shelves ^

With these shelves:

The point of the kitty superhighway is part fun, part knowing your cats' temperaments, and part multi-cat household peacemaking measure. You see, Yuan and Maggie are not friends.

Tell them, Daddeh

I have tried many strategies to help this situation, and at best, we have tolerance. At worst, we have Yuan scaring the pee out of Maggie. Literally. He's made her pee when she was caught unawares by an ambush. He never really hurts her - there's never been blood or anything. He just likes to be a bossypants bullycat and wave his claws around.

The face of innocence

So, in Jackson Galaxy terms, Yuan is a "tree dweller," that is, he likes to be up high. Maggie is, when she's nervous, a "bush dweller," (she likes to hide in safe down low cubbies) and when she's feeling confident, a "beach cat" (the one who will sprawl across the middle of the floor, the hallway, the doorframe ...prime tripping area, you know). This makes life easier because if Yuan is chilling in his high up shelves, he's not bothering Maggie sprawled across the floor. So I started building shelves.

Ideally, you want them to be able to circumnavigate the room without touching floor, and have more than one on/off ramp. The completed bridge will make a horseshoe kind of arc around the main room of my apartment with two on/off ramps.

So, how to spend hours making one square foot of suspended kitty bridge?

Take a piece of metal shelving from one of those stackable sets you build into whatever cube configuration you want with knobs on the corners.

These

Weave rope back and forth through it as much as you can. Caution: that makes your project a cat toy even before it's a cat shelf.

It's a snake, hooman

Add a throw rug on top to make it solid so little kitty paws can't poke through the holes. Put two ceiling hooks up and hang it from two rope loops you made when you were weaving. Discover you've just made a kitty seesaw. Oops.

Add another ceiling hook and hook it with an old spring from your Pilates chair whose mate broke a long time ago. Still not stable. Not finding any more ceiling hooks, use a piece of gate latch you had leftover from a steampunk gun prop project, and two screws that also fit some leftover ceiling hook plaster brace parts. Hang it with chain you used to hang houseplants on. Still not stable. Begin to panic.

Find the other two ceiling hooks. Hook them with more chain. Success! You now have a stable suspended bridge and tons of plaster dust from your popcorn ceiling all over your freshly vacuumed floor. With that many hooks in it, it should definitely support your twenty pound cat.

There's just more of me to love, Daddeh

So that was my Epic Project on this snowy day. What did y'all do? 😃