A Cat Bathroom Built for Two

Did any­one else think of this when they read the title?

C’mon, there’s no way I’m the only one?! Side note, when I was 10 years old one of my teach­ers pro­posed to another one in our audi­to­rium while the whole school sung this song…it was a pretty small school.

Ok, first, let me intro­duce you to…

Other than the boyf these guys are the loves of my life. And if you know me, this is sur­pris­ing because I was always a dog per­son, but I have def­i­nitely been swayed.

Some of you may have noticed the hole in my office wall from my house tour
pic­tures (it’s under the Ikea end table). It’s time to reveal the mys­tery (because I’m sure you lost sleep over it…no?). Well, it leads to two lit­ter boxes in the garage.

You may remem­ber when we were putting in the new floors the rea­son we found the water dam­age is because we were try­ing to get the pet smell out of the car­pet where the lit­ter boxes used to reside. Know­ing we’d be upset if the guys ruined our new floors the boyf came up with this out­door pri­vate cat bath­room idea, which I must admit I was a lit­tle hes­i­tant at the time. I mean, cut­ting a hole in the wall? But it turned out great and we (and the guys) couldn’t be happier.

An added bonus was that we have an extra work bench in the garage, and you can hardly notice it’s even there. Plus clean up is much eas­ier since the garbage can is right there. It was pretty easy to make, and it only took a few 2x4’s, sheets of ply­wood, hinges, pet door, vents, a small motion sen­sor light, and a small usb fan.

To adapt this your­selves, you could prob­a­bly find a work bench tuto­r­ial over at ana-white.com, like this one. You will need to close up the sides with ply­wood but make sure to cut out a square for the door. Then attach the door (we just used a piece of ply­wood again) with hinges. To make sure they couldn’t push the door open we just screwed a cou­ple pieces of scrap wood in loosely so we could turn it to “lock” and “unlock” the doors when we need to clean out the cat lit­ter. See:

Of course you need to make sure air can get in there and move around so cut a space out for some vents, these we picked up at home depot. Then to make sure the air was mov­ing we picked up this adjustable usb fan from newegg.com. It’s meant to plug into your com­puter with a usb cable, but we used a cell phone charger and plugged it into the wall and just keep it run­ning on a low setting.

We installed a motion sen­sor light so when they enter it turns on and they can see what they are doing. Sur­pris­ingly it didn’t star­tle them at all.

And finally, just install the pet door and you’re done. You can find the one we used here,
and actu­ally we had it left­over from a dif­fer­ent project gone wrong, more on that later when I show you how we fixed it.

There you have it! Aren’t our guys spoiled? Scorch had a lit­tle trou­ble with the door, but we’ve been work­ing with him to get used to it. We have been adding thicker pieces of plas­tic and are work­ing up to the real thing. We’re hop­ing to put the real door up soon so we don’t lose too much cool air.

What pet bath­room solu­tions have you come up with? Has any­one tried the Lit­ter Kwit­ter
to train their cat to use a real toi­let? I’ve always won­dered if they work. And please tell me you’ve hear of the song Bicy­cle Built for Two?!

***UPDATE - Cre­ativeKristi brought up a good point on twit­ter today. Car­bon monox­ide can get into the house if you cut a hole into the garage and you keep your cars in the garage or use any motors in there. We do not at all so we are safe. But if you do, you might want to alter this into an inte­rior closet. Just an idea. And thanks Kristi for mak­ing sure the guys and I are safe!