Cats in the Alcove – Part 5

Success, FINALLY!

The path towards getting Birdie access to the alcove above the living room TV has gone from Saturday’s botched attempt:

To a Spackle-covered fresh slate:

To finally this:

        

Hooray!

It’s a stairway comprised of 5 platforms.  The first is just below the alcove:

Which goes down one more step before reaching a mid-point in the doorway between the living room and downstairs hall:

And ends at Birdie’s downstairs hall cat platforms.  Darwin was kind enough to be my cat model.

So far, Birdie has not given the new platforms the time of day, but Darwin finds them intriguing.  Now he can access the alcove from both sides:

Currently he’s taking a snooze in his cat tree:

Because I was so irritated at my inability to hang any shelves [to my liking] during 8 hours on Saturday, I propelled myself into a frenzy of productivity yesterday afternoon.  Between 4pm & 6pm I successfully hung all 5 shelves!  I decided at the outset to use the utilitarian metal shelf brackets I bought at our local hardware store over the summer.  They’re ugly, but they’re awesome.  They provided much more support than the little metal braces I’d tried to use Saturday, and were more understated than the black IKEA brackets I’d used on a few shelves on Saturday.  I spray painted them all white and within 15 minutes they were dry to the touch & ready to go!

I hung this shelf first [the one on the left]:

Then pried the ramp treads off one of Saturday’s ramp fails and used it as the middle shelf.  I tried to use the same drywall anchors from Saturday:

But the existing holes didn’t translate well to the new shelf and it was noticeably slanted:

I couldn’t live with that.

So I pulled it off the wall, pulled out the anchors, patched them with Spackle [and re-Spackled all the other holes while I was at it], attached new brackets to the shelf, drilled new holes in the wall for anchors and tried again.  It was perfect.  And, of course, I don’t have a picture.  Gah!  But you can see it in the pics of the final product.

Next up I hung the shelf at the top, right below the alcove:

Then I moved around the corner and hung a shelf above Birdie’s existing downstairs hall platform:

As you can see from that picture, I was double-drilling it.  I had my cordless drill set up to drill holes in the wall and my corded drill set up to screw the shelves in.

Here’s Darwin enjoying the finished product this morning:

       

And again this afternoon!  He was purring so loud you could hear him halfway across the room:

This is as close as Birdie’s gotten to the new shelves:

A.k.a. glaring.  I’m hoping she’ll warm up to them!

Meanwhile we’re dealing with Snowmageddon 2.0:

That shovel was just barely jammed in the snowbank as of Friday and now it’s completely buried.  MEH!

It’s hard to describe just how much snow is outside.  The snowbanks are above everyone’s head.  So in order to shovel, you have to heave your whole weight to toss the snow up onto the snowbanks.  It sucks!

        

        

And we have more snow coming Thursday and next weekend.  OMFG!!!  Can I please retire to Hawaii NOW???