Our cat Cricket still has her front claws, which means that she needs to stretch and sharpen them occasionally. We never really cared that she scratched on the back of our old couch because we didn’t really like the couch anyway. But now that we’re in our new place with new (to us) couches, we are hoping that we can keep her away from the couches. Which meant that she needed a scratching post!

We headed down to BRING Recycling, which is a home reuse store in Eugene to pick up supplies. And here’s a little tutorial to show you how we made our post.

You will need:

• Carpet scraps (we used 2 carpet squares)
• 4×4 post, tall enough for your cat to extend his/her legs up
• Baseboard (ours was an old cabinet door in a school)
• Nails
• 4 screws
• Small scrap of fabric
• Sisal rope

1. Nail the long edge of your carpet scrap to the post.

2. Pull carpet tightly around the post, overlap the ends a bit, and nail to secure. Use a fair number of nails to be sure that it holds tight.

3. Trim carpet to fit your base, and nail to secure.

4. Add a pretty little scrap of fabric to the top. I secured mine with little tacks. Don’t worry about the edges; they will be covered in rope.

5. Tack end of rope to the post right above the carpet with a nail. Then wrap tightly all the way to the top.

6. Secure rope around the top with nails. Tuck in end.

7. Cut a hole in the center of the carpet base so that you will be able to drill holes without the drill getting caught in the carpet.

8. Drill 4 holes in base and in bottom of post.

9. Screw together base and post with 4 screws.

And you’re finished!!

Here’s Cricket right after we introduced her to it. She’s gotten a few claws in it, but I think we still need to do some training.

Update: After just a few days, Cricket stopped using the couch and now soley uses her cat scratching post. We never even had to use catnip to lure her to it! We just dangled some of her toys over it, and she discovered how much nicer the post was. Hooray!