Thread: Unleash the Beast?

We too live in an area where letting the cats out would be impossible (we are on a wide residential road which is supposed to be 30mph but most traffic seems to hare down at 40+).
Our three have the run of the house, but we also have a deck with a pergola over it, to which they have access via a cat flap. The pergola is fully meshed and the gate that leads into the garden has a padlock, so cannot be accessed from the outside, unless the gate is unlocked. Our garden is not overlooked.
The deck and pergola arrangement is accessed by humans from the breakfast room (we have a stable door there). We also have a completely enclosed side access which leads to the shed that my husband uses as a workshop and effectively, the side access, shed, deck and pergola form a massive "cat compound".
When we leave for work, the cats can either choose to go out onto the deck and if it rains, they can either come back into the house or (more often than not) they camp out in the shed. My husband is really neat when he is working, so there is never anything left out that might harm the cats.
We love this setup - it means that, weather permitting, we can sit out with the cats and they can enjoy the fresh air in safety.
I guess if anyone WANTED to get in, they could wire-cutter their way through the mesh, but if they got into the house, they'd be deafened by the alarm system!

Prior to the pergola & deck arrangement, we had a cat run attached to the shed - this was a simple construction which was, effectively, single storey (from a cat's point of view, that is, it was a little over three feet high) and "wrapped around" two walls of the shed in an L-shape. The access then was via a catflap from the shed to the run and there was a mesh fence and gate from the shed to the wall of the house, with a meshed roof (so once again, the cats were effectively enclosed). We built the deck and pergola arrangement after winter storms had weakened one end of the cat run and GabbyCat got out!

I'll try to post some pix of our setup later, to give you some idea of what I mean (difficult to describe), but lots of people here have built similar things. The cats really love being "outside" - they get to swear at the pigeons and squirrels and they watch the birds on the bird feeder with GREAT interest!!