We’ve been moved in for a number of weeks now, but we finally brought the cats over from the old house last weekend. As any cat owner knows, cats are very different from dogs. When it comes to moving them, dogs are like “cool! vacation!” But cats are like “hey, where the hell are you taking me and when can I go home?”

It was a bit stressful for both us and the cats, but after a few days, everyone seems like they are making progress. The cats still mewl at night sometimes like they miss the old house. I’m giving it time, though.

Both the dogs and the cats are sleeping inside in a very small house, but we figured the dogs can’t climb the alternating step ladder to the loft space. So the cats have their own space to get away from the dogs, but they still end up coming down and hanging out with the dogs when we are around. Nonetheless the loft is a bit small, so we decided to build out a little more vertical space for the cats and figured we should do it before the cats move in. So last week we got the workers to build a number of “cat shelves” into the walls around the main living room area.

We figured it was best to do the install before moving that cats in so that the cats wouldn’t have extra stress from the workers walking in and out and drilling into the walls. (Not to mention the possibility that the workers would let the cats out as the went in and out. Given the number of dogs around that aren’t familiar with our cats, this was a possibility we would much rather avoid.)

In the end, we now have a kind of cat “Super Mario Bros. for cats” game in our house:

As you can see from the last one, I went and hung a projector screen from the “cat shelves” as well. I’ve always been a big fan of projectors as relatively inexpensive giant big screen TV’s that take up almost zero wall space when not in use. In this case, the screen covers a door when in use, and folds up above it when not.

The shelves are staggered around three walls allowing the cats multiple routes from the loft near the ladder, around the far wall, and back to the loft on the other side. If I were a cat, I’d be pretty excited to explore!

Only one of our cats has been bold enough to explore much so far, and she hasn’t gotten all the way around yet:

But she did get to the top. 🙂

They also seem to be having fun lounging around on the alternating step ladder at night…

So now everyone is moved in and hopefully we will all get settled over the next few weeks. Hopefully.