New Installations

Jules is starting to roll around, which means it's only a matter of time before she starts crawling. Which, of course, means it's only a matter of time before she starts falling down our stairs when our backs are turned. Which is why we took the precaution of buying ourselves a baby gate from Ikea. Sure, we had to go all the way to Chicago just to go to Ikea, but we have friends up there so it wasn't a trip just to go to Ikea.

So I thought I had a good "before picture" of the top of our staircase, but it turns out, nope. But here's one with the baby gate.

Fancy

But we had a small problem with installing this baby gate:

Not cool, guys.

See, Amethyst's food and water are on the main floor, but her litter box is in the basement laundry room. So we had to come up with a plan; either we move the food and water, move the litter boxes, get rid of the cat, or develop a system whereby the cat alerts us to her need to use the restroom/eat and drink. Those were my ideas, anyway. Kathy is way more of a creative problem solver when it comes to home improvement projects. We discovered that if we put the stationary side's rubber pressure mounts on the smallest setting, that would leave enough room on the gate side for Amethyst to squeeze between the gate and the wall without being too big of a space for Jules to squeeze through. The only problem was that the pressure mounts on the gate side were not long enough for us to do that. So I once again started coming up with solutions involving the cat ringing a bell, once for up, twice for down, when Kathy (once again) was far more practical and smart.

Top

Not the Top

We had these blocks of wood which we attached to the wall and baseboard, which gave us enough space for Amethyst while still giving us a shorter reach for the pressure mounts.

She's not easy to get a picture of when she's moving that fast

So with a minimal amount of squeezing and dexterity, Amethyst can get through while Juliette stays safe.

Also, she's just going to lay there and guard it.

What's that? You want to see a picture of Juliette? What, you don't come here for pictures of the cat?

Ignore the fact that this was taken before the baby gate was installed.