A catio for our kits Clifford & Lucia!

About 10 years ago my wife and I were sitting on the patio at the back of our house, having grilled food on the grill and eating dinner al fresco.  Whenever we would sit at the patio table our cats would sit in the window and look out at us, crying at us because they couldn’t join us and the dogs outside.  On this day I was telling my wife how bad I felt for the cats when she said “So why don’t you just build them a catio?”  “A what?” I asked – I had never heard of a catio before.  And so, several weeks later, I had designed and built my first catio, which our cats have enjoyed ever since.

A 3 level catio – with a spiral staircase!

Several years before we had taken a trip to Banff Canada and, after that trip, I built a firewood rack in our yard inspired by the log structures I saw there (see the first photo in the photo gallery).  I wanted our catio to match the log design of the firewood rack so I used the same rough cut fence post design, with 2×2’s notched into the posts for the horizontal supports of the upper and mid levels of the catio.

Our cats enter their catio from the house via an acrylic window insert with a cat door (https://catflapfever.com) that is about 6 feet off of the ground.  I designed our small 2’ by 4’ catio with a spiral staircase so the cats can move between the 3 levels in this small catio. For the welded wire that encompasses our catio, I used/repurposed an ex-pen used for containing small dogs/puppies in an unfenced outdoor area.  Our ex-pen, as with most ex-pens, was eight, 2’ by 4’ sections hinged together.  I repurposed the ex-pen into two sections, one stacked upon the other, to build a 2’ by 4’ by 8 foot high catio.  Hence the 2’ by 4’ by 8’ high catio design.

Clifford took to the spiral staircase right away and roams all 3 levels of the catio since I completed the catio. It took Lucia awhile before she got comfortable using the spiral staircase; we think she was worried about fitting through the small openings. Clifford is more petite than Lucia.  Lucia eventually became comfortable with the spiral staircase and she now roams all 3 levels of the catio.

Since building this catio, I have built 4 more catios for my clients.  And yet, I am most proud of our catio…maybe because I can look at what I built, and what our cats enjoy, every day…

I should warn you:  I’m including A LOT of photos in this post so as to document the building process.  Since I was building this catio for us, and not for a client, I could take the time to document the building process through photographs.

Edit March 2025:  Since building our catio our sweet Clifford had to leave us.  We miss Clifford terribly – he was such a sweet and loving boy (see the videos in this post).  Lucia still enjoys the catio (she is 15 years old now with asthma so we only allow her access to the catio May-October).  After Clifford passed we decided that Lucia should live out her days as a single cat without competition for attention.  I suspect that, someday, we will again have multiple cats roaming our beloved catio…