Most recent project

If you recall, we'd started to accept the phrase "blogging the cat" as the blogosphere's equivalent of "jumping the shark". I blogged the cat twice in the first year of blogging. I didn't realize there was a lower level of shark-jump-ulatiousness: blogging the cat door.

Since we got the puppy, the cats have had a tougher time getting to their food and litter box. When Xander was very young, he could fit into the same spaces as the largest cat could, so we had to literally barricade off part of the house as "dog territory" to allow the cats to eat in peace.

Now that Xander is much bigger than the biggest cat:

we decided that we could take down the main barricade and provide the cats with a cat door into the laundry room which is now where their food and litter box reside. The first step was to cut a rough opening in the laundry room door:

The door was pretty flimsy, once I started to drill the corners out: it's literally just two formed hardboard sheets, separated by some cardboard spacers. Cutting the opening wasn't particularly difficult, although the pullsaw I was using did tend to catch very easily, so the cuts weren't all that straight. The next step was to cut the lining (the portion joining the front and back frames).

I ended up using maple for this . . . and it turned out to be a lot more work than I'd bargained on. The rough maple board I started with had just about every wood fault known to man. It was warped, so I hand-cut it into three unequal lengths. It was cupped, so putting it through the planer meant it took several more passes before I had a flat-ish face to work with. Two of the pieces developed a twist — after I'd cut the full board down. Once I had a straight-ish, flat-ish piece to work with, I hand planed the edge . . . except that the centre of the edge was literally popping up as I planed it down. What started as a relatively straight edge developed into a noticeable curve.

What happened is that a small knot near the centre of the board was decompressing as I took away the surrounding wood, so it was pushing upwards almost in proportion to the amount of wood I was planing off. It was a very nice looking piece of wood: a bit of birdseye along one length, a bit of tiger stripe a bit further along, and some faint spalting at the other end. But it was so badly tensioned that getting straight, flat boards out of it was nearly impossible.

Eventually, with much effort (more from Clive than from me, to be honest), we got the four pieces of maple for the lining assembed and could start working on the "good" face:

I gave up on the idea of trying to use the remaining maple for the face frame, so we grabbed a leftover piece of ash from a previous project and used that:

A quick bevel on the outside edge, then carefully mitred corners, and it was starting to look like an intentional project, rather than a piece of random wood-art.

It took a fair bit of filing and scraping to get the frame to fit the rough opening (you can still see some of the dust from that in the previous photo). Once we were sure it would fit well, a less artistic frame was screwed to the back (the side facing into the laundry room), and several coats of shellac finished off the project.

That's Cinders, one of our two long-haired cats, peering through the cat door. Not only does it make a safe haven for hungry cats, but it also provides occasional amusement when Xander tries to see what's happening in the laundry room . . . a defenceless dog head, just at claw height. Cinders really appreciates the new entertainment option.