IKEA Hack: Stolmen cat tree

Small space living with pets ain't easy. I know, because I'm doing it. Kincaid, magnificent beast that he is, loves nothing more than to get in your way (he is a cat, after all) at all hours of the day - whether it be in the middle of the night or while you're trying to do something on your computer. At night he walks on you, and in the day he falls asleep on top of the keyboard.

So when I came across this IKEA Stolmen cat tree hack, I knew I needed it - partially because I really needed to get Kincaid in a space where he could chill out and do his thing, but mostly because it looked pretty, design-conscious, minimalistic, and catified af.

Here's what you'll need to make your own:

Wood planks
Dinner plate, or similar (for templates)
Bandsaw or jigsaw
Sander
Hole saw
Drill
1x IKEA Stolmen pole
4x IKEA Stolmen suspension fitting with 2 holders
8x bolts and nuts
Supervisor Cat

Since I'd been decluttering, I was left with two perfectly empty, perfectly good, usable IKEA Ivar shelves. These shelves are solid pine and well strong enough to hold up the weight of a cat, so I decided to reuse them.

First step was to use the dinner plates and bowls to trace out a template. This left me with four shapes of platforms.

Then I borrowed a friend's wood shop, and use bandsaws to start cutting the large planks into more manageable pieces, as well as start roughly cutting them down to the size of the template, taking straight edges off sides wherever I could. Since I didn't have a jigsaw, I couldn't be as precise as I'd have liked to be, but I like to think that the rough knobbly-ness of the finished product adds to its charm.

Be careful not to get overconfident and winding up getting too close and chopping bits off.

Next, use a more flexible bandsaw (or jigsaw, or whatever tools you might have at your fancy) to cut finer details into the platform - any more intricate curves that you might not have been able to do with the first straight-cutting bandsaw. At this point the rough template of the platform is done!

Now the pretty-making part. Since up to this point all the platforms were cut roughly with bandsaws, I used a belt sander to take the edges down and smooth out the curves. This was by far the most time-consuming part of the project, since it took a lot of sanding and checking to make sure that I didn't have any bits that could stick out and injure someone (or some-cat!)

Sanding down the edges so that at least the platform looks finished.

Not bad for my first real woodworking project, I'd say - I haven't been even remotely close to a wood shop since D&T in secondary school, so I consider this a success.

The next bit is drilling holes so the main part of the Stolmen pole fits through the platform. I got a friend with a hole saw to do this for me. The Stolmen pole measures 4.6cm in diameter, so we used the closest option we had available: 5cm. A couple of wood clamps, a decent hole saw, a centering marking and we were all good to go!

The result - a perfectly circular 5cm hole.

The next holes to drill are the screw holes for the Stolmen fittings. This was pretty easy - no specialist equipment here, just a regular old drill through marked-out either sides of where the suspension fitting was going to go.

Marking...

... And drilled. Done!

Then it's a simple matter of assembly. The Stolmen pole is just a tension rod between the floor and the ceiling that's surprisingly sturdy for how simple of an idea it is! I slid the platforms through, and then placed the platforms at the heights I wanted. Make sure each platform is rotated at a 120-degree angle from the next platform so that your cat can move from one to the next.

I used bolts, nuts and washers to fit it all together, using washers to fill the space between the platform and fitting so that it would stay sturdy. Make sure you tighten everything nice and snug!

The final, and most important step of all, is for you to have gone through all this effort and be proud of what you've done, creating your wonderful cat tree only to realise that your cat is deathly afraid of heights and won't go anywhere near it.

In Jackson Galaxy's terms, after you've built and designed your wonderful cat tree, you realise that you don't have a Tree Dweller cat but a Bush Dweller. He would much rather hang out on your floor and in low spaces and doesn't really have a need for your magnificent cat tower, thank you very much.

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Announcement: Photography Portfolio Update!

Hi everyone! Here's a quick announcement - from today, my photography portfolio will now be hosted at cherylkphoto.com! This is where you'll find the best of my photography of the most recent years - travel, landscape, and some portraits. My photographic style has been evolving in the past few years and I expect it will for some time to come, and this is where you'll be able to keep up to date with what's new and changing.

For personal reasons, I haven't been as active here on the main site as I should. I'm gonna try my best to fix that - my life's all sorts of upside down right now, and because I try to write quality rather than quantity I don't always have the space to sit down for hours and write new posts every week. Blogging is fun, but the world of post-graduation is chaotic and filled with questions of what to do with my life. So far, what I've done with my life has been a whole ton of figuring out what to do.

I've also managed to get in a bit of time to write some music for a couple of projects I was attached to, both mastered and aided in no small part by the wonderful Iliya Zaki:

Have a look/listen and let me know what you think? Music, as some of you might know, is what I've been working towards for a very long time in my life, and I'd love to keep being a part of it. I'm starting to properly explore the creative side of myself for the first time in forever (!) and would love your feedback on both my music and photography.

Help me make myself better!

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