Today’s post is less about the felines, and more about the feline confinement yard… aka the Catio.

When I created the space, I was on a budget. So I lined the paths and open areas with landscape fabric and threw down some mulch. And it worked well. It wasn’t perfect… it had to be weeded, and replenished yearly… but it worked. Then we got Lemmy.

Remember that when Lemmy was kitten, we had a problem with him using houseplants as a toilet? Well… he did the same thing with the mulch. Only there was no way to train him out of it like the houseplants. It wasn’t so bad in the nicer weather – I could get out there and clean up after him, much like you would with a dog. But in winter.. it was harder. Every spring, I’ve had to do a mega poo clean up – and toss out a pile of otherwise decent mulch (thankfully, he mostly kept it to one area).

I’ve longed to switch the paths over to stone anyway… and a little while back I go a $150 gift card for Home Depot. So I looked up the cost of stone, and figured it would cover at least half of what I needed. I ran the idea by Dave, and Monday we headed out to the store.

When we got there, he talked me out of the stone I was going to get, and into a much prettier stone. I was going to get much smaller, rougher river rocks, but he wanted the rounder, bigger beach stone. Of course, his stone was 50% more expensive, and the bags were half the size. We got 15 bags, as much as we could fit on the cart. I knew it wouldn’t do the whole catio, but I thought it would do at least half…

Not even close! It didn’t even fill the big sitting area at the end by the porch. I’m going to need another 15 bags just to finish off this area. I think it’s going to take at least 30-50 more bags to do the whole catio. So it’s going to be a much longer, much more expensive project than I planned. But Dave is right… it’s going to look pretty good.

I think the cats are going to enjoy having some cool rocks to lay across on hot summer days. And I’m going to enjoy not cleaning up poopies!