"kitty kloset"...

We love our cat...but we love our house being clean more. :)

For awhile now, it has really bothered me that we had Kassie's litter box sitting, in plain sight, in the kitchen. That, to me, is just rude when we have guests come for dinner. And it's just gross.

So my handy husband installed what we're personally calling the "kitty kloset" (spelled with k's in keeping with the whole trend there...Kassie, kitty...). He cut *gasp* a hole in the wall of the hallway where the linen closet in the guest bathroom is and attached a frame that has a clear plastic flap that swings in or out (the same kind of concept as a "doggie door"). We put Kassie's litter box in the closet. Now she has a "doorway" into her "bathroom" and we don't have to see the litter box. It's out of the way and not grossing anyone out anymore. :)

It was a test to figure out how to get Kassie to use it. Jeff put it in Friday (he worked from home, lucky thing) and every 20 min or so he would put Kassie in the closet and close the door so the only way out was through the "doorway". It took her a few times to figure out that it opens if she pushes on it from the bottom. She would figure it out and then forget the next time Jeff put her in the closet. So she finally got used to getting out...now how to teach her how to GO IN to the closet?

We enticed her by putting a few bits of food on the ledge and then another small container of food inside the closet. She was pretty hesitant and actually only ate the food on the ledge; she didn't even try to go inside the closet to get the other container. So we decided we would open the closet door and keep the bathroom door to the hallway closed, and we'd put her whole food bowl in there (we have an automatic feeder that drops food twice a day). If she wanted to eat, she was going to have to get in there somehow! And the only way in was through the "doorway".

She's such a smart cat...she figured that out a lot quicker than the coming out part. What a relief! I'm so glad to have that litter box out of the kitchen! And the "doorway" in the hallway doesn't look near as bad as I thought it would when Jeff first posed the idea to me back before we even moved into the house.

So the plan is to somehow block off the bottom portion of the closet so that when a guest opens the closet door to grab a towel or washcloth, they don't see the litter box. The challenge is to make it accessible enough for us to be able to get to it to clean out, etc.

We're still working that plan out in our minds...