Handmade Cat Scratch Ramp

Our cat, Coco, loves to keep her claws razor sharp.

She was feral for the first year of her life and she’s still a wild child at heart. She plays with a lot of energy. She throws her toys in the air, catches them, and then throws them again while running around the room… over and over again. She plays with her toys like she’s trying to kill them.

When she sharpens her claws, she does it with the same intensity. Lucky for us (and for her) she is a very well behaved cat and only sharpens her claws on her scratching ramp (and once on the tree when she was able to escape outside).

When we adopted her, I bought her a scratching ramp made of corrugated cardboard. It was relatively inexpensive. It was kind of like this one, but it was in the shape of a wave.

In true Coco fashion, she liked to climb up on it and get her whole body into the action. As you can imagine, this ramp didn’t last long and she broke it into about 4 or 5 pieces that looked like this:

Of course, being the awesome cat that she is, she kept using it (well, them, since there were several pieces) as her one and only scratching implement. I appreciated that, but not the little pieces of shredded cardboard everywhere! I mentioned to my sweet and handy hubby that I was planning to buy her a new one and he told me that he would make something for her.

He had a 4×8 sheet of cardboard that was leftover from a recent lumber delivery (It doesn’t get any better than free!). He cut it up into 3” wide strips, rolled glue on both sides and then clamped it all together. He then made a pattern on a piece of scrap wood and, using the band saw, cut the cardboard to match the pattern. He cut some arts and crafts style legs and since she’s a “climb-aboard” scratcher, he reinforced the span between the ramp and the legs with some more corrugated cardboard and scrap wood.

Sorry, since he didn’t know I was going to do a post about this, I don’t have any photos of the building process.

This ramp is so nice! It’s cute, heavy-duty and the cat LOVES it.

She’s been using it for over a month now and it’s holding up really well to her abuse, much better than the old one!

What kind of scratching post does your cat prefer?

Vi snakkes! (“See you later” in Norwegian)