How To Keep Your Cats From Destroying All Your Stuff

It’s been a while! Things have been happening! I bought a house! (Hence the radio silence for what seems like an eon… at least for me.) I’ll dive right into the meaty bits of our topic today—our furry little destructo-bots—but hang around until the end if you want an update on life in Why Cat HQ (aka my house).

With the incredibly stressful purchasing and renovating of our little fixer came the sudden realization that I now own things that I’d prefer my cats not destroy. Like, a couch that’s not from craigslist. Or houseplants that aren’t hand-me-downs precariously clinging to life. I’m a full-on grownup, y’all. I have houseplants and upholstered furniture. And heathen fur kids.

On the topic of cat claws…

We’re about to get obnoxiously preachy for just a second, so feel free to skip right over if I’m preaching to the cat choir. Or if you just don’t feel like being preached at today. Once a week at church is quite enough, you say? I get it.

Rant begins:

Cats scratching can’t be helped. It’s an inescapable part of living with cats, as integral to the experience as cleaning out litter boxes and getting your face stepped on as you sleep. To those who think they can solve the issue once and for all with the dreaded declawing, let’s talk. Declawing isn’t about as bad as having your fingernails ripped out. It’s worse! In declawing, a cats’ distal phalanges, or the end bones in their toes, are amputated, comparable to having your fingertips chopped off behind your first knuckle. The recovery process is long and incredibly painful, and many cats suffer from phantom pains for the rest of their lives. Others lash out and become biters, as they lack claws and feel unable to defend themselves in stressful situations.

You can probably guess my personal stance on the matter. In general, I have a very pronounced distaste for humans who feel the need to harm or otherwise
“modify” an animal to better suit their lives. I firmly believe that we are only guardians of the creatures in our care—we don’t own them, and they certainly don’t exist solely for our pleasure. We hardly deserve to have animals as our companions, but I think we should spend every day endeavoring to earn the privilege.

Rant ends.

 

Prevention

Before we get into prevention, we have to first accept cat scratching as an unavoidable behavior that nearly every cat will engage in—it’s cathartic and therapeutic and relaxing for them, all at the same time.

The number one thing you can do to prevent inappropriate scratching is to provide plenty of appropriate alternatives—not just one scratching post shoved in back room. Try to vary your scratchers by material and orientation, since some cats prefer sisal and others prefer cardboard. Some enjoy tall vertical scratchers, while others are more horizontally-inclined. Hey, if you want to encourage good behavior, the alternatives need to be legitimately appealing!

At the minimum, keep one in every room you frequent, and ideally in close-ish proximity to the furniture you’re trying to protect. My cats like to stretch out and scratch as they follow me from room to room, so I make sure that an appealing, officially-sanctioned scratching spot is always readily within reach when they enter a room.

From there, there are a few tricks you can employ to protect your furniture and discourage cat infringement. The easiest method that I’ve found involves heavy duty packing tape. Whenever I bring a new and enticing piece of upholstered furniture into the house, I wrap the corners with clear packing tape, like so:

The best part of this is how subtle it is (in person, you kind of have to squint at the edges of the couch to see the tape in action). If you wrap your corners neatly and with sturdy packing tape (heavy duty is best), it lays smooth and undisturbed for months.

It’s great to do this as soon as you bring in a new piece of furniture. If your cats never get to associate the furniture with scratchiness, it’ll be easier for you to maintain that status quo.

After a few months (the longer, the better) of tape-wrapped corners, you can remove the plastic little by little without your cats being the wiser. Try not to freak out if you remove it too early and your cats have a slip-up. Just snip any loose strings and re-wrap! A few loose threads on your couch does not portend the end of days.

Pro tip: Cats naturally gravitate towards upholstery with chunkier weaves. If you’re shopping for cat-proof furniture, run your fingernails across the fabric. If you feel lots of little ridges and resistance, your cats will be more prone to scratch it. A great material that most cat claws can’t get purchase in is velvet. I have a single velvet chair in my livingroom that my cats—blessedly, mercifully—completely ignore.

Redirection

For more permanent protection and appealing-scratching-alternative in one, I’ve had incredible success with this little contraption:

Sofa-Scratcher Corner Protector

Ours tucks under the leg of our bed and protects my precious non-craigslist upholstery. This kind of scratcher is the most effective when the area is just too appealing for your cats to resist, like protruding corners, or in tight spaces where a conventional post would take up too much space.

My cats are absolutely obsessed with it. It’s been the ideal pre-bedtime spot for them to smear up against, scratch, and hump in blissful adoration. And since it comes in a range of furniture-friendly colors, it has the added benefit of not making my eyes bleed. Which is important.

Take it away, Pips.

(It also comes in squared corners:)

Sofa-Scratcher Squared

Here’s another heavyweight favorite in my house—one that many of you are probably already familiar with. It takes up a bit more space, but serves as a great household “Scratch Central” and can take a beating from even the most avid scratch connoisseur:

SmartCat Ultimate Scratching Post

For those on a budget, I’m a big fan of IKEA’s self-wrap sisal cat scratchers. I think they’re currently only $6 in store, and you can use them to convert any table leg or stair railing into a quick and easy scratcher. They’re also fantastic for laying over the tops of couches (another popular scratching spot), windowsills, or tossing in random rooms where you simply cannot cram another stick of cat furniture.

Here’s Pippin graciously modeling one of his:

Having these laying around in all your cat’s usual haunts is an extremely effective furniture scratching deterrent. When given the choice, cats will almost always rather sink their talons into nice rough sisal over a linen couch.

Remember, curbing destruction requires a two-pronged approach: Prevention (tape up your corners!) and Redirection (have appealing alternatives within paw’s reach).

What about plants?

Ah, yes. The irresistible (and toxic) cat salad. You’re not alone—my cats like to eat my plants too. Fortunately prevention in this regard is a fair bit simpler.

Specifically, just elevate your houseplants out of the reach of your little turds. That means plant stands and windowsills are your friend. Lots of plant stands.

Left stand is IKEA. Right stand is Homegoods, the motherlode of plant stands.

Smaller plants can be perched on a windowsill with a barrier protecting delicate leaves from a kitty’s fiendish maws. I like to leave enough space on the sills for the cats to climb up and look out the window, but always with a wide, heavy barrier at the end of each row of plants.

Jars of marimo moss balls work great for this purpose (and are almost as cute and fluffy as our fur-burgers themselves).

Drat. Foiled again.

The cutest cat barrier that ever was.

When a plant is simply too large and heavy for a plant stand or windowsill, use natural cat deterrents like lemon to ward off your sneaky snackers. Prepare a few lemon rinds or cotton balls soaked in lemon juice, and arrange them on your plant’s low-hanging branches or pop a few right on top of your potting soil. You can also spritz diluted lemon juice directly onto your plant’s leaves. One nibble will have your sweet little gremlin running for the hills. 

If you want to venture into proper plant/cat aficionado territory, familarize yourself with hanging plants—the ultimate in cat-proof greenery. I’m a big fan of air plants in hanging terrariums, trailing ivy and pothos, and kokedamas.

WhyCat HQ

If you’ve read this far, allow me to punish you with a brief update on life in the new house. The cats have adjusted swimmingly to their new digs, as cats do. They’re quite taken with stairs, and have added a stair-storming sequence to their nightly cat rodeo repertoire.

In the vertical space department, I broke down our old, slightly customized cat tower and repurposed the perches into a series of wall-mounted cat shelves, with a sweet little honeycomb hideaway at its base:

Wall-mounted cat vertical space always seemed a bit more elegant to me. And I can do double back handsprings in the floor space we’re saving (just a very slight exaggeration). The DIY itself was super simple. I picked up a few shelf brackets from Home Depot and we were in business!

In more exciting news, I think I’ve finally cracked the cat bathroom conundrum and fashioned the most perfect and effortless litterbox (that isn’t an electric-powered machine) that ever existed. It’s essentially my previous sifting litterbox hack, with a few key upgrades.

We nixed the “Breeze Litterbox” system entirely (the side walls were laughably low, and even when surrounded by a large plastic tub, Pippin was still managing to pee over the sides and onto our walls. Furthermore, any urine that managed to stay within the outer tubs still sat festering in little pools at the bottoms until we could rustle up the courage to rinse them out. Which, honestly, wasn’t often).

Here’s what our old setup looked like:

And here’s our current:

You know you’re a proper cat nutter when the sight of a bespoke litterbox sends shivers of delight down your spine. Just me?

We nested two large plastic storage bins inside each other, with the interior bin’s floor cut out and replaced with 1/4″ galvanized hardware mesh. A tray slides into the bottom of the outer bin (through a cutout) to catch sifted litter.

I feel like this is finally maybe perfectly the END of our years-long journey in search of the ultimate smell-free, mess-free, easy-cleaning litter box solution. Read about all our previous litterbox iterations, frustrations, and interim solutions here. You’ll probably recognize a few of the issues we faced in your current fur-friend bathroom sitch and glean some useful tips. 

This current (and hopefully final) setup wasn’t exactly a simple DIY build. It involved lots of Dremel cutting and a ridiculous amount of hot glue to secure the steel mesh to the bottom of the sifting bin. But cleanup (and smell) has never been more pleasant. Thanks to the steel grate, broken down sawdust falls through to the bottom tray practically on its own. All we do each evening is skim off their poops (into another amazing odor-busting contraption, the litter genie) and give the wood pellets a quick and gentle stir. About once or twice a week, we dump the sawdust in the bottom trays into the trash. SO EASY. 

If you’re interested in seeing our DIY build breakdown, just holler in the comments.

Whew. How’s that for a comprehensive update? Anything I missed? Other than you guys? (I missed you guys!)

Read on:

Your cat is destructive in the knocking-things-over and climbing-inappropriate-things sort of way? Learn how to outsmart a mischievous cat

Check out a few of my favorite cat-centric DIYs

Now that your cats are leaving your precious furniture alone, let’s tackle that fur infestation

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