New Kitty Room

Now that we have a bunch of nice new furniture, eating dinner while staring at {and occasionally smelling} cat food was much less appealing. So we decided to move the kitty feeding area to the basement, into one of our two closets by the garage. But they looked like this....

 Actually, I snapped those after I pulled out a few things...you don't want to see what it looked like before. The one on the left was mostly paper products, and the plastic drawers (which act as our medicine cabinet). The one of the right- well it was a mess. It pretty much had a little of everything in it, including a couple of boxes that we never unpacked.

So after so reorganizing and removal of stuff that really just needs to be donated, we had this...

 Yes, those are my high school prom dresses... I have no where else to put them, haha. I should probably just find a charity to donate them to. I did manage to get an extra wear out of them by using them for sorority formal dresses (and trading with other people for formal). Anyways...

So we decided to turn the smaller of the two closets into the kitty room. But being the nice people that we are, we didn't want the kitties to have to eat in the dark, and since they can't use a light switch {at least that we know of... Lion does open cabinets}, we needed a lighting solution. I know, I know... cats have great night vision, but it makes us feel better....

We found that Leviton motion sensing light switch at Home Depot for about $19. It was super easy to install, and it worked! At least it did for us, not so much for the kitties. They are too low to the ground and it senses 180 degrees horizontally. We thought about turning the whole outlet on it's side {so the switch would sense 180 degree vertically}, but that started to be difficult when the electrical box wouldn't easily come out.

Throughout all of this, Nutmeg was extremely helpful.... can you tell? Yes, as a matter of fact, those are the instructions that tell you how to install the switch that Nutmeg is attacking...

So back off to Home Depot to figure out a new solution.... we ended up deciding on these things that you screw into the light bulb socket and then screw the light bulb into. They have lots of varieties, but this one has a motion sensor. It works really well and the kitties are able to activate it! We also picked up the wire hanging shelve at Home Depot for about $10 which has dry food containers and a water jug stored on it. On the actually wire shelve above that, we have kitty toy storage, cat health products (grooming, flea medicine, nail trimmers, etc), and extra dry/wet food storage. We also added that wood shelve from some scrap we had lying around to hold some wet food and their food bowls.

We still have to pick out a cat door to add so that we can keep the door closed. But overall I'd say this was a success! Our cats might be a little spoiled.... But hey, at least we don't have to look at their food anymore while we eat!

Pet Couponing

We've been slacking on the blogging lately, but that'll change as we finish up the laundry room and a couple of small projects over the next few weeks. So I thought I'd share something I've gotten into lately, Couponing!

It's very addicting. We've been couponing for grocery type stuff for almost a year, give or take a few months when I haven't done much, if any. I go on the blog sites, make my list, and usually save about 30-40% without too much effort. And that's buying stuff we USE, not like the crazy coupon show where they buy 100 of one thing and save like 98%. That's not realistic. You can't eat 100 toothbrushes. Okay, that was all of my gripe for now...

The point of this post was supposed to be Pet Couponing, so I'll get back to that. I never really thought much about it, other than using the occasional Fancy Feast or Friskies coupon that comes in the circulars. That is until they built a new Petco down the road from us, and I went on a Saturday morning because we were out of food and the kitties were grumpy with just dry food (yeah they are rotten). So I signed up for the Petco card while I was there, and the cashier was telling me all about their coupon policy since the store was practically empty that early. Turns out they accept all competition coupons (I've since found out that Petsmart does too), and conveniently there is a Pet Supermarket right down the street that puts out $2 or $5 store coupons every week! It opened a whole new world of couponing to us! And since Nutmeg has to eat high quality food (or he has poop issues), it's works out awesomely that we can get the high quality food for the same price as or cheaper than the normal Fancy Feast or Friskies.

 So the without coupon total from this transaction would have been $30.43, and we saved $18.25, for a total of $12.18 OOP (Out of Pocket). That's 40% savings! We bought a brush for $6, so take that away and we only paid $6.18 for the food, that's equal to 26 cents a can! For food that is normally 87 cents a can (Nutromax 5oz.).

So how? Well Petco had a sale, so if you bought more than 10 cans, you got 10% off the food. We had a Pet Supermarket $5 off $25 purchase, so that counted as a store coupon. Plus, we had two $5 Pals Rewards Dollars. Basically like loyalty points, and those are the reason that I now think Petco has better deals than Petsmart.

Smelly Kitty Litter Box - Part 1

If you're like us, finding a place to keep litter boxes is always a challenge. It's no fun having an exposed litter box out in the middle of a room, so in apartments I'd always stored it in my bathroom. Which isn't so fun either... getting out of the shower and stepping on litter...yuck! So we definitely wanted to find a clever way to conceal the litter box in our new house. There's a lot of tutorials and ikea hacks out there for concealing a litter box in furniture, but we couldn't find any that would work for us.

So we came up with the idea of turning a chest into a litter box container, and then adding a cushion to the top to use a sitting area. That is, assuming it doesn't smell...

Step 1
Determine the size of the entrance hole. You can do this a few different ways- if you are going to buy one of those pet doors and install it, just cut the size specified by the company. We decided to make our own flap with vinyl and frame the hole with metal flashing or wood trim. So we used a medium sized pet door as a guide, which said the opening was 8.5" x 11.5," which we decided to round to 8.5" x 11" for simplicity. So we centered and taped down a piece of paper as a guide. If you are making a different sized hole, just measure and draw out your rectangle.

Step 2
Cutting out the entrance hole. We drilled a hole in each corner using the largest drill bit we had on hand, which was 3/16"[check]. This ended up being too small and we had to continue widening the hole enough for the jigsaw blade to fit in. Disclaimer- Always use caution (& common sense) when using power tools, and be sure to wear safety gear to avoid injury! We used a wood blade meant to cut through 3/4" wood for the jigsaw, and followed the outline of the paper. Depending on the layout of the chest and where you placed the hole, you might run into the same problem we did- the jigsaw has safety 'rails' (not sure what they are really called...) around the perimeter of the blade, so when we got towards the bottom of our hole, we didn't have enough space to cut along our line. So we had to change blades to a longer all purpose blade and very carefully balance the jigsaw on the trim of the chest. Note- I wouldn't suggest doing this, but since we'd already dug our hole.... In the future I'll pay more attention to where we place holes before starting. Live and learn.....Anyway, everything turned out for the best and we got the piece of wood out.



Step 3

Figure out what to use a litter box. We wanted to use the biggest size litter box possible for the chest (20 lb Maine Coon, remember?) So I headed over to Family Dollar and found a good sized pink storage container for $10, which fits pretty perfectly width-wise and is still a decent length to give them room to move around. It has high sides so we had to cut a rectangle out of it so they can get in (A plus to the high sides is that litter won't get kicked out quite as much). We started out using the jigsaw to make the cut, since the plastic is so thick, but bad idea! You can't really get a stable base, so the plastic was getting pulled up and down with the blade instead of cutting, so we just ended up using a knife blade (which is what Greg is using to cut with in the picture, I promise).

Step 4
Set up litter box for cats! That was all we had time for in one night, so be on the look-out for future posts to complete the litter box. We'll be adding a flap to the hole, and trim around the hole, and likely add some hanging storage for the litter box scoop, and maybe a place for some air freshner :) Then the final project will be adding a cushion to the top, for additional seating, or a place for some kitty naps :)

Overall, the cats seem happy with it. We're leaving the top open for a few days so they will explore it without feeling trapped. And since the hole we cut out doesn't have any trim yet, we covered it with duck tape for now to prevent any splinters to the cats. Check out them exploring! (which of course happened within a few seconds of setting up since they are such nosy creatures)

Psst! Check out the update to this post!

The Beginnings

Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree.....

Yeah, I'm pretty excited about having our first tree. We have 2 cats, a 7 month old kitten and a 3 year old Maine Coon, so I'm also ecstatic that they tree is still standing after 5 days :)

Why are we starting a blog? Well, we like reading all of the other DIY blogs out there and think it will be interesting to document our own progress. And maybe we can help a few of you along the way. We bought our first home almost 2 weeks ago, and we moved in one week ago. We'll be posting more about the home on the House Tour in a few days, so check back there soon! And you can check our the About page now to learn more about us!

We've done a few simple projects so far, so we'll be blogging about them in the coming days, like painting our refridgerator with chalkboard paint, and turning our buffet into a coffee/alcohol bar. We've got some bigger projects on our to-do list, like painting the kitchen cabinets (maybe, we haven't decided yet), remodeling a bathroom, and then all kinds of outdoor projects once it gets warm again. We'll also share recipes and other activities along the way. Hope you'll join us!