How to make a homemade cat door

We live in a modest ranch home. Due to our home’s size and floor plan, we do not have a good place on the main floor in which to put our cat’s litter box. When we moved into our home we decided that the most logical course of action was to put it in the basement and leave the basement door cracked so that our cat would have access. Our basement isn’t finished, and since our cat is a jerk sometimes and poops on the floor, this was really the only good solution.

Here’s the problem: we now have a cat and a baby. This was just fine until The Baby began to crawl. Since our cat is fat fluffy, we couldn’t expect him to leap over a safety gate to enter and exit the basement. We purchased a cat-door at the hardware store, but our cat was too fat fluffy to fit through it. So we (by “we” I mean my husband) made one ourselves.

1. Mark the area on the door to be cut with pencil
2. Take the door off its hinges and saw out the hole for the cat
3. Frame it with corner molding (in Lowes/Home Depot with the wood trim)
4. Paint molding to match your door
5. Hang piece of white fabric behind door (not pictured)

Here are the results:























Uh-oh… make sure baby doesn’t fit through the hole. NOTE: measuring the width of baby's shoulders doesn't work since they can maneuver them to fit through many a tight spots like the birth canal or, say, the new cat door that your husband just made.



An award for me?
Weeeeeeeeee... Thanks to MommyK at Great Walls of Baltimore for honoring me with an award! With the exception of an honorable mention in a science fair, I never won anything! Oh, and I cheated - I picked the leaves off of plants to make it appear that they didn't grow as well with rock music as they did with classical music. They actually didn't grow as well, I just wanted to make it more obvious. Anyway... Thank you!