The kitty room

Maybe the most unusual room in our new house is what we're calling the kitty room.  It's a small, small bedroom that could hold a twin size bed and a dresser.  The current owners use it as an office.  But since it's just the two of us, and we'll have other rooms for my office and the guest bedroom, we've decided to give the room over to our cats.  There are many reasons why.

One of those reasons is that it has one of the few windows facing the street.  Our cats LOVE to perch in the window and see what's going on out there.  We've planned to put their jungle gym right in front of it so they can spend the day watching birds or whatever else.

Also, we've been trying to figure out where to put a litter box on the upper level.  We're a little tired of having it in our bathroom, so into the kitty room it goes!

One of the best, and unusual, features of the room is the strange inner dormer it has.  Here's my horrible Paint rendering of it:

Lovely, no?  So, the black part is the door, and the brown part is the dormer.  It goes back a couple of feet.

Nick and I tried to figure out what to do with that space - a plant? find a way to let the kitties up there or will that freak me out?

Then, I was reading one of my regular blogs, Lifehacker, when I came across a story recommending putting up Ikea shelves to create a cat perch:

 Genius!  Now that I've seen a photo of it done, I can definitely see us using this idea.  It might give me a heart attack if I see them jumping from perch to perch too fast or in hot pursuit of one another, but I know they'll love using that funny dormer for an afternoon nap or to hide from each other.  

I love that the cats get their own room.  We definitely won't be using the same ones as shown in the Lifehacker pictures.  Ikea makes some fantastic shelves with hidden brackets so the shelves look like they're floating.

Here's my mock-up of what their room will look like once we install the perches:

I'll definitely take a picture of this once they're installed.  I hope it turns out the way I'm seeing it in my head.