I built a DIY CAT TREE with real branches (and a built in litter box)

hello everyone welcome to my channel i am esme and in this video i am going to show you how i built this huge cat tree the tree is made from real wood and here on the bottom here we have a built-in litter box and recycling bin and it's just so nice to have that all tucked away and inside the window silk here the build our window silk so that it's not inside and it goes perfectly with our interior and the cats absolutely love this they love to sit in a tree and play with it it's a little bit different video than i normally make but i thought it would be fun to show you guys um how i made this and as you can see here here are our cats we have our big cat hair poo and then our little cat whizzy it's a little kid in here and that we got recently as new addition to our family and they are so cute together so when we knew that we were getting a new kitten we decided it is time to give these guys a little upgrade and build them a very big cat tree so let's show you what we were starting with this was the before we had our litter box and our recycling bins here and we have this huge empty window with a lot of room there to build something nice so we thought that we could put this all together into a built-in litter box and recycling bin and after that i had the idea to add the cat tree on top the supplies that we got was some rope to decorate around it we also got a whole bunch of wood that you will see later in this video and i got all these resting looking hinges i also got a new litter box here and we got these shelves to use for the cats to sit on later on to build the recycling bin i decided that i could reuse the inserts that we had in our old bin it was a little bit broken but the inserts were still fine so to reuse those i had to make a frame for the bins to fall into and so i just traced it first on a piece of cardboard so i could trace it on this piece of wood and then i used my jigsaw to cut it out and i did that three times for our three different recyclings at first i thought that this might have been a little bit tricky to make sure that it would fit perfectly but they all fit it straight away on the first try and it's just so easy to take out your garbage bins and take it outside to be recycled and then after i made this frame i took it inside to attach it to the big frame that you see here i actually didn't feel me making this that is because it was quite difficult to get it to fit perfectly to our space i had to figure it out and i just basically figured it out as i go to make it fit perfectly to the space that we have and it's going to be different for whatever space you might have it is not attached to either the wall or the floor here the way we have it attached is actually the window silk it had some pins coming out of the wall and we used those pins again to drill some holes in a piece of wood so that we can slide that into place that way and here you can see how the inserts fit here i made sure to leave enough space above the insert so that i could make the lid on top there later on and here's a little example of the wood i'm going to use this is actually our bath tray that i decided that the wood was really pretty and i wanted to use it for this project as well so yeah here you can see how everything fits just perfectly in this space after the frame was done and everything fitted into place it was time to start putting the planks on the exterior the planks that i use here are actually for outside use since cats are going to use it and it's going to also be a garbage bin i had to make sure it was really sturdy and the wood wasn't going to be damaged very easily by water or anything like that and the wood wasn't that expensive either so that was a huge plus so what i did here i just measured how long the boards needed to be then i went outside and cut them to length using our table saw back inside i screwed them into place by first pre-drilling the holes and then screwing them in i made sure everything was nicely sanded so we didn't have any rough edges here and it just looked nice and smooth and this process actually went pretty fast and it's just so nice to see how it's going to look and it gives you a nice idea of how big it's going to look in this space and i was just so nice with how everything was turning out so here you see me screwing all the holes there were a lot of holes to screw and i picked up an extra screwing machine here for my father-in-law so i have one with the drill in there and one with the screw head so i didn't have to keep changing those and i could just kept going so that was a huge tip for if you're making something like this and you have to do a lot of screwing i didn't have a kneeling machine so we decided to use all screws instead so here we are making the lid for our recycling bin um i first got all the pieces aside i sanded it all and then i put on this backing here to have them attached all together make sure that you have enough room for it to turn a little bit so i would recommend like putting them a little bit more of the edge i had to go in later and shorten it a little bit further so that it could close up properly and also make sure that when you put in the the frame for your bins to go in that it's low enough for it not to touch your garbage or anything and if you want to you could even put some protecting sheet here on the inside to protect your wood but we didn't have any problems with mold or anything and if we were going to i would just put something in there as well [Music] so it fit perfectly and now it's time to put onson hinges and really make it look super cool and useful just measure where they need to be i again pre-drilled all the holes and screwed them in with these tiny screws and i love how these hinges look on here just give the rustic effect with like the look tone and then these big hinges is are so cool with everything together and later you don't see me adding those but later i went in and drilled in some soft closed dampers so when you just throw the garbage bin closed it's softly closed and there's not a huge bang like inside the house the only down part to this garbage bin is that you have to open it by hand but since we were dealing with a broken lid anyway we have been doing that for a while now and we didn't bother at all so yeah that was the recycling bin done i think it's just super pretty and i love it and it's just really handy because our kitchen is right on the left there so we can access it super easily here on the right side is going to be a litter box and i decided that it probably was easier for this to open through the front so i can just lift it out and clean it easily or go in with my vacuum cleaner and clean the inside so we made this little door to open towards the front and it just works perfectly it's like easier to clean in a normal litter box and i just take it out and put it on top of the recycling bin and then clean my litter on the front here there's also going to be a hole for the cats to go through and i just traced over this plate so that i have a perfect circle and went in with my jigsaw again to cut it out another thing i want to mention is you might have noticed that in the back here we have a heater actually behind the recycling bin and the litter box um but we don't use this heater so we shut it off we didn't use it before because we have a lot of heaters this room used to be closed off but they open open it up before and now we don't really need this heater anymore that's why we we decided that it's okay to put this in front of there but you shouldn't close off a heater normally if you're still using it so here i'm cutting the hole with a jigsaw um i actually made sure that i left enough space here on the left between the jigsaw and the little the little piece of food here that i could still go in and cut this hole and then i made sure i sanded everything nice and smooth since the cats are going to go in and out here you have to make sure that everything is safe and they don't get any splinters and then i put in here the hinges for the other door we luckily didn't have any trouble with our cats getting used to this new litter box i even thought maybe in the beginning with our new kitten i had to leave it open so he could get in there way more easily but he had no problems he loved looking into the little hole like seeing what's behind there and uh yeah it's just really nice to have it tucked away like this you can still see in there because it's really dark inside you don't really see um see any of the litter in there and like i said i can easily take it out put it back in and close it off to make sure that it's closed and the cats don't push it open i installed this little lock here it helps keep the door closed and it also just looks super cool i love how this looks and how it works and it just helps with the whole rustic look that we are going for so again i pre-drilled those holes and screwed it in and here is the end result of the little door the last thing i had to do here was screw in the top planks and then the first part is done um i was already so happy with how this look and i couldn't wait to add the tree to the top here so we have our garbage bin here that's so easy to just take out and clean and then the litter box as well and yeah it just looks so much better than having those two being there such an eyesore to uh to our kitchen living room you would just see it from the couch and it's just not so pretty to look at and i just love looking at this watching them jump around play on this as well later when we add the tree you'll see just yeah it's just fun to see them it's like having your own little tv with their cats playing all the time [Music] so of course i had to show this to pooh to see what he would think of it and he had to get used first a little bit to his new place to eat he's he kept running to the other spot there but he really liked it he started using a little box straight away we had no problems with that it was just so cute to see him coming out of his little yeah his little hiding place there and at first we put on our old scratching poster but in a little bit he's going to have his huge tree and in a couple of weeks he would have his little his little friend there to play with him inside the tree and he absolutely loves it [Music] so now it's time to start building the actual tree part my fiance works as a forest ranger in a nearby forest and he was able to get us this super pretty wood to use for this project we had so much nice pieces to choose from and we ended up using multiple pieces to create our big tree at first we had to look and see how we were going to put it what direction was going to be in and then i needed some assisted to attach it to the bottom here and i just put in some real long screws first again drilling some holes and then screwing it in and my lovely fiance here is holding it in place for me so i could screw it in so just screwing it in from the bottom here it isn't super sturdy i think sturdy enough for a cat but later on we are going to put in our little cat shells that they can jump and sleep on and they are going to also be attached to the wall there so that it's more sturdy and i also make this little crate here and i thought that was a fun addition that they could sit in and they could sleep in and play in and the kitten used it a lot so it's so cute to see him sleep in there and just put his little paws through the holes there i intentionally made it a little bit crooked so that there's a bigger hole in the back and now that it's literally it can still go through there but the big cat can't so in a little bit it's going to be too big as well for it for him to fit so we took the time together to figure out how we are going to lay this out we knew this first bead piece on the right there it had this little curve so we could curve it around this little wall and it's super cool because you will see later on we have this little shelf that's sitting on top there that's just looking into the living room and our cat loves it he sits on there bear and he looks into the window looks into the living room while we sit there in the evening watching movies and here you see the shelves that we're going to put in in a little bit and see how it's going to look already so the tricky part about this is you have to get the angles exactly right you have to cut the wood in a way that it's going to be flush at the bottom and at the top and so it took a little bit of time figuring out and cutting and cutting and cutting again to get it to be perfect but it's definitely worth it screwing it in and having it be more sturdy if everything is correct that way but just putting in a couple of screws it already worked out pretty well and it was looking super nice and you will see in the end like our five kilogram heavy cat is going to jump around through these things and it's not going anywhere it's so sturdy i was surprised myself with how sturdy it was and i'm an engineer i'm a structural engineer for liv for a living but these kind of things you just go with it and see how it turns out but you put in more screws if it isn't sturdy enough but in the end it was yeah really sturdy but as an engineer there's a simple thing if you have multiple spots to have it attached to get three points to have it attached to something and then you will definitely have it to be sturdy on your ix your eye and your zed so later i also went and added another post here i had this other curvy bit i had to make sure that the lid from the garbage disposal could still open so i kept checking that while figuring out how i'm going to put this and then here just eyeballing the ankle on the bottom here to have it fit perfectly and then screwing it in with the smaller pieces it was fine to do it on my own but the bigger pieces you really need someone to hold them for you or to keep it in place i screwed these wooden pieces together here through the back because i didn't want you to be able to see the screws here to have it really have that tree look as if it belongs together but there's going to be plateau here on top so as you can see that i'm installing here so it won't be very visible but if you want to you can also cover up the screws using a bit of rope and as i was building this it was getting easier and easier because i have got all these plateaus to put things on that i was using so they were yeah i was surprised with how sturdy they were and you can see me put a screw here on top but i also screw them into the side there and here you can see it as well that i'm screwing into the window frame here which is a very hard booth so it could withstand that and then i of course had to get my cat to have him figure out if he liked it to get him to play around with it and i tried to get him to go up but he didn't want to i guess they tried it with toys but again i had to get him some treats and retreats like my cat loves treats so he he really jumps up there and it quite took me like a day i think after day i came home from grocery shopping and he was sitting in there himself and said i think they are in there every day they love to spend time in the beginning i was a little bit scared because my experience if when you buy or build something for a cat he doesn't use it so i was very happy to see that they really love this and i think it's also because it is in the perfect spot they can sit here and watch the outside or they can sit on there we're sitting right now to see into the living room so they have their overview and yeah i can imagine that it's a nice spot to be in and now it's a little bit hot in the middle of the summer but um in like the spring when the sun is coming through they just love to lie here in the sun and look at him there on the top being a proud cat he's so cute so now for the fun part it was time to add all the decorations so i put on the rope of course the bunch of it for the cats to scratch on and to climb on at first i thought maybe i should use some nils or some glue to get this on a tree but i ended up just nodding it that worked best for me i'm a girl scout so i know a little bit about making knots but yeah just a simple knot usually works or just google how to make a knot on a tree and here you can see all the rope that i added uh it took quite some time to like swirl this around the tree but the cats love to play with this and here is the end result already we put this little olive tree on there as well to just add a little bit of greenery and i think it looks super cool in our interior we have a lot of plants and this boot just brings it all together so if you like this video make sure to leave a comment we have some plans to maybe extend this to add a little bridge to another part of the living room to have a little cat highway if you'll be interested in seeing that make sure to let me know and i would love to show you and look at them they always want to be on the same plateau and our little kitten he's always climbing around and playing they love this little stick that's sticking out there they love to scratch on that instead of like using their rope but yeah it's so cute and here is when our kitten when we first got in and they were playing together for the first time they were just figuring out how to play together and what was okay and what wasn't as you can see your poo is getting a little bit distracted and then he gets he was scared by the kitten which was so cute he was like what's going on but they yeah they got friends so quickly like after a week they were already cuddling together i loved how they are together like i said they always want to be together like especially if kitten he always wants to sit where his big brother is sitting so cute and we hung all these toys on the tree they have a place to scratch and it's just so so pretty so that is the end result i hope you liked it if you have any questions about the build let me know in the comment down below and i will get back to you thank you so much for watching don't forget to subscribe and i will see you guys next time [Music] bye

Channel: Esmee Heebing

Views: 396,416

Rating: 4.9730697 out of 5

Keywords: cat tree, cat diy projects, cat DIY, Scratch post, DIY cat tree, cat climber, branch cat tree, cat furniture diy, cat furniture, cat house, diy litter box, litter box, scratching post, diy tutorial, cat tree tutorial, cattree, kitten, building cat tree, cat tower, diy cat tower

Id: VFDtl-i3kv0

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020