Help Furkids Win a Car!

I just wanted to take a second to write about Furkids, the no-kill animal shelter Greg and I volunteer for. They are in a competition on Facebook to win a car, which would help the organization tremendously! It'll just take a few seconds of your day to help.

Go to https://apps.facebook.com/nalleydrivenforacaus/contests/224746/voteable_entries

You'll have to authorize the app (which you can revoke after you vote if you want in your settings). Then vote for Furkids! It would be amazing if you could vote everyday until June 30th!

Furkids is currently in 2nd place, and we need your help to take 1st! Furkids cares for over 650 animals EVERY DAY! That's a lot of cats and dogs! Greg and I have been volunteering with Furkids for about 2 years, and let me tell you it's truly an amazing organization. They take in as many animals as they can, and they don't turn away from the days old babies and difficult medical cases. My baby Nutmeg, we found on a car outside Petsmart (after someone choose to leave him there instead coming to talk to us about surrendering him) when he was only about 2 weeks old, a Furkids foster took him in and bottle fed him. Trust me when I say Furkids does EVERYTHING in their power to make sure they can save as many animals as possible and another car would help with that!

Cute & Crazy Kitties

I've been trying to snap a lot of random pictures of our cats lately, and since they don't always make it into a post, I thought I'd share a lot of them here!

Lion hiding on the top shelf of the closet... no idea how he got there!

Nutmeg is helping assemble Greg's meat smoker

Lion loves tummy rubs!

Inspecting the cabinets before we hung them in the garage

Nutmeg also needed to inspect the cabinets to make sure Lion did a good job

Nutmeg has a weird obsession with the cardboard box of litter, he chews holes in them!

Cats and boxes.....

Old picture of Nutmeg- he was 2 weeks old!

Another old picture! He was only mildly destructive...

Passed out kitten!

He likes to drink out of human cups, so I put water in a coffee cup for him. I swear it wasn't coffee!

Nutmeg hiding in the box, he did this to himself!

So then Lion had to check out the box....

Lion sleeping in my travel bag....

Nutmeg playing with the piping for my sewing project & inhibiting me from getting a good picture!

Smelly Kitty Litter Box - Part 2

So we're getting close to 4 months with our new litter box system. The cats love it (or at least we do!), the basement doesn't smell like a litter box anymore, and (most of) the litter is contained and not spread across the floor! So since it seems to be a success, here's what we've done now:

What we wanted to do was add-

1. Trim around the outside of the hole
2. A 'cat' door
3. Hanging storage for the litter scoop and a few bags

Eventually, we want to add-

1. A upholstered cushion on top
2. Touch up the wood where it's been scratched
3. Possible fix the hinge for the top (you can see that it's bent and destroyed) 

 


Cat Door

We headed over to Hancock fabric and got a subtle grey vinyl. Cut it to size using the cut out door as a model, then just glued it above the inside of the door. I'm not sure how much it actually helps with keeping smells in, but it does make it look nicer. Plus, the cats don't mind it. It's kind of cute actually, they peak in first to make sure it's not occupied before entering!


Door Trim

So we still haven't done this, we've had some many project going on, it's been impossible to get anything done! It'll happen eventually, so I'll do another update then. Hopefully that update will include a few more fixes/upgrades!


Litter Box Extension

The litter box we had originally put it there would probably be fine for one cat, but we have one massive cat (Lion) and one quickly growing kitten (Nutmeg)! We looked around forever for a storage box, or any kind of plastic box that were the right dimensions (less than 14" wide and as long as possible). Once we determined that no one makes boxes that size, we came up with the idea to get another box the same size as the original, and put them together. This almost doubled the length of the litter box! We tried gluing them together, but as of now, haven't had a great solution to attach them, so now they are mostly secured with pink duct tape. It's worked surprisingly well so far, but we're still trying to think of a better solution!

Litter Box Essentials

• Litter scoop- Hanging on a hook on the wall near the entrance
• Litter mat- Since the one we had goes up the walls of the chest, they kept falling over. So we added some garment snaps to keep it in place. Three snaps per side seems to hold pretty well.
• Plastic bags for used litter- Originally we thought about adding storage inside the chest to hold plastic bags, but we didn't want to crowd them too much. For now we store them in a small trashcan next to the litter chest, but I saw a Pinterest project for storing them that I'll have to try!

Overall, the litter box chest has been amazing! It pretty much contains all the smell and keeps them from spreading litter everywhere.  The only time you really smell something is if your next to it and one of them decides to use it, but even then it's not too bad. Doing normal stuff like having an air freshener in the room helps too, of course.

Mission: DIY Cat Tree

Mission: DIY Cat Tree is short for "Mission: Keep the cats off the dining room table!" But that seemed too long to be a blog post title :)

Our cats, like most others, love to look out windows. Bird watching, squirrel watching, they love it all!

If I could only find a way out, I would so hunt
down those birds and eat them.

~Lionheart (the 20 pound Maine Coon)

Trust me, he trys to find a way out the door almost everyday, so I'm pretty sure that's what he's thinking. Little does he know that he wouldn't get his daily wet food.


Anyways, back on topic.....We want a small cat tree to put next to the dining room window, since that's where the cats [mainly Nutmeg] like to hang out and watch birdies. We already have one next to the french doors by the deck, which is also a favorite location for bird watching. I bought a cat tree probably 5 years ago when I first brought Kitty to Atlanta. She never cared much for it, and neither have Nutmeg and Lion. It's almost identical to this one available on Overstock. So 5 years of wear later, the top platform has been broken off, and it's a little wobbly. Plus it's huge and the only place we could find for it was next to the TV console in the basement, which encourages Nutmeg to run across it in his hyper fits, never a good thing!

So we deconstructed it a few nights ago and decided that we'll re-purpose it to build a new, nicer looking and probably small cat tree. Maybe we'll even turn it into 2 cat trees! These are some images I found online that we like-

So we'll see what ends up happening with the kitties and their bird watching. This project might take awhile to finish, we have soo much going on lately! Greg's parents are coming for a visit this weekend, and  next weekend Kristine and I are going to visit Kristin! And on a somewhat related note, check out another adorable video of Nutmeg playing golf! He's so tiny in the video, it was taken in July 2011.