Thread: Outdoor cat enclosures

Looking forward to seeing pictures of it when you are finished!

Yeh I just need dh to mesh it all... that's whats going to take the longest... just getting him to get it done!
But then he might just surprise me... he has on occasion without me hassling him. Usually he leaves things like this to the last possible second and gets all uptight cause it's not done.

In the next two or three months Im building a large enclosure on the side of the house so would be very interested to see the end result of yours and to hear of anything that you learnt along the way.
The mesh is a concern of mine as I want to make sure its going to last for years without any worry of rust or them being able to bite through / dig under it.

I'm not sure what mesh dh is going to use. We have some aviary wire down the back yard so he might use that with some chicken wire.
We won't have any problem with them digging out as it's the space between the house and the fence which is probably just over a metre wide.

Originally Posted by Tomiam

In the next two or three months Im building a large enclosure on the side of the house so would be very interested to see the end result of yours and to hear of anything that you learnt along the way.
The mesh is a concern of mine as I want to make sure its going to last for years without any worry of rust or them being able to bite through / dig under it.

Time has come for me to start planning the building of my enclosure. Well.. not literally mine, its not like Im being kicked out of the house you understand.. Its just that as the warmer days are creeping in, I can see the house getting very hot without being able to leave some doors open.

Would appreciate hearing about anything you learned building yours Scrapdragon. Anything you would do differently etc.

Essentially mine will be rectangular bolted to the side of the house, mounted onto the existing patio. Have found some welded wire mesh on ebay (seems to be thicker than chicken wire) and am planning on a wooden framework to support the mesh.

We used the welded mesh on our pen it seems to be a lot stronger ,our front frame is 6ft square,sorry only know the old way,originally only had one upright & one baton across to support it but have had to put stronger strutts & increase it to two down as one boy has taken to climbing it & two thirds the way up lets go with one front paw & just hangs swinging on it with other front paw & pushing himself with his back feet,no problem to him just a bendy frame & heart attack nearly for mum first time she saw it & more work for dad to make it stronger. When we first built ours cats could get into our back garden so we done a two foot wooden spit guard at the base of the pen to help protect but now garden is cat proofed not so essential but I still like the look of it so hubby will have to continue the maintinance on it & talking of cat pens sun shining bright here so now going out to give ours a spring clean,all beds already in the wash,have fun planning & building yours,we did....

I'm actually still waiting on dh to finish it!!!

We are using the existing framework for the shade house which is attached directly tot he house. We are putting Laserlite (I think it is called) for the roof so it will let light in but keep the area dry.
We have shadecloth down the side to the fence but dh is going to put wire mesh there to strengthen it and we have mesh at the end with a door frame made from shadecloth.
When dh has finished doing the roof I will take pics so hopefully that will be this week.

I thought I would share some pics of the cat run that i took today.
Still work to do... the roof and the shelves.....




and here are the cats playing on the branches I have int he old aviary for them to climb on....




And the doorway....

Looks fabulous - they will have a ball out there!!!

Originally Posted by Tomiam

In the next two or three months Im building a large enclosure.....

Ok.. well its now a while since I posted that comment but Im VERY happy to say that Im done It was a lot more work than I thought it would be, probably six or seven 10hr days to completely erect the frame work, treat the already treated wood, pin on the welded wire mesh and then.. eventually.. let the cats out for a play

I borrowed the works van for a day and headed off to B&Q to grab all the wood & fixings I would need. One thing I will say about B&Q is that when they say "they will cut any wood for you" what they actually mean is any wood that hasnt been treated.
Might not seem a big difference, but when you've just lugged 20x 3m long beams, 10x 3m posts and 4x huge 4.8m posts across the superstore only to be told .. "sorry sir, we cant cut pretreated wood as we would then be selling it as untreated". Kinda takes the... (rude word).

Anyways.. moan over
I went for hot dip galvanised welded wire mesh, sourced from ebay. Ended up using 30m of 6ft wide 1" x 1" mesh and 20m of 2ft wide 1" x 1" mesh. I figured this would be stronger than chicken wire / nylon mesh, and it definately appears to be so.
The enclosure has two gates on it. Both of them are spring loaded (top and bottom) to ensure the gate always closes, and in that respect it does it admirably :D

I let Storvenn and Loki out in it last night and it took them a little while to become confident. What was their 'whole world' (our house) suddenly looked very small to them I bet, but things were quickly forgotten once they discovered "FLIES!!!!"
Both appear to love chasing em down and 'clapping' them out of the air with both paws!

No furniture has been put in there yet, but we have plans to have a ledge under the kitchen window so they can come out of the house that way in the cooler months, rather than we keep the door open all day.