Litter Box Project

When I was little we had a door between the dining room and the living room and I would make a point of slamming it shut whenever I went through. My parents were at the wits end after telling/ yelling at me to stop slamming the door. Finally, my dad said "The next time you slam the door I am taking it off it's hinges and putting it in the attic." Of course I walked over there and slammed it. The door spent the rest of the time we lived in that house in the attic. It was a pretty effective way of resolving the issue without just spanking or scolding me. You can't slam the door if there's no door to slam. 

Since bringing the cats home, we've gone through various phases of cat-proofing attempting to do the same thing- remove the things they find to cause problems. This works for the most part. We don't follow the rules on the litter box though. They recommend having 1 more litter box than you have cats, which would put us at 3. We've barely had room for one box, so this was never an option and we're typically too busy to clean it more than once a week. Lucy shows her disapproval by making an art of getting as much litter outside the box as possible. Her success is astounding and baffling. For example, we now have 3 floors and the litter box is in the basement. She manages to spread it all over the basement floor, up the stairs and somehow gets a little all the way to our bedroom and into the bed. We can't exactly remove the litter or the box, so when we discovered our friends had a top entry litter box and said it really cut down on the litter tracking we were thrilled! On Amazon, they cost about $40, which is absurd. That's double what I paid for the boxes we have and it's nothing more than a glorified storage tub. So, here's the how-to in pictures for building your own (should you find your self in need) for $10 each. [...]

We bought two 18 gallon tubs at Home Depot for about $8 each. They are about 24" x 16" x 16.5". The $40 version is 20" x 15" x 15" with a 9" hole and aren't recommended for large cats.

That's a 10" stove burner cover (came with the house) that I used as a template for the hole. Trace and cut with an exacto knife. Turns out 10 inches is plenty big enough for Tom.

It's not easy to get a perfectly smooth circle.

Sand the plastic spurs off of the rim. I also used Gorilla tape to line the rim for extra protection. 

We got these rugs at IKEA for $2 each. We had them at the last place for shoes by the front door. They were a bit too large, so I cut them down and then traced and cut a hole. I can't find the glue gun to permanently stick them down, but the Gorilla tape worked just fine. All in all it probably took about 20 minutes to make each one. Now we have a litter box upstairs and one in the basement and hopefully a lot less litter in the rest of the house.