Khan's Little Helper

I've been meaning to write about the great stepstool my husband built for Khan, right after we adopted him. We realized right away that our bed was too high for him to jump onto; in fact about the highest he could jump at first was around 24" (our bed is 32"), and that was only after he'd gauged it a few times and worked up his courage to do it. Now that he is a year older, his jumping capacity has been reduced to about 10", or at least that's all he'll attempt.

So the step stool was built, originally at about 17" in height, which took him about halfway up to the bed. We covered the top with padded fabric for comfort, it was made 17" square to give him enough room to get all four paws on, to give him a resting point. And, because my husband is an overachiever, he made it so the top can open up to reveal a little cat toy storage compartment.

We had to teach Khan to use it, which took a bit of doing (he's a slow learner, my boy), but he was soon using it regularly until a few months ago when he just stopped bothering with it and instead meowed at us to pick him up and put him on the bed. I also noticed he wasn't jumping onto the lower furniture anymore either, so we decided it was time to build a secondary step onto the stool. He fixed it so that the lower step could be pushed in flush with the rest of the stool, or it could be pulled out for Khan. The pull-out step was slightly angled, which at first presented a problem; Khan came to us declawed on his front paws, so he tended to slip a little on the lower stool. Instead of covering all over with fabric, my husband came up with the idea of putting some strips of textured but soft fabric across the lower step, to act as paw grips. At its highest point, the low step is only 8" off the ground.

The new, enhanced stepstool has worked really well. Khan began using the steps again with little encouragement, and he uses it to go down as well. I like it much better than most of the ones I have seen for sale, because their surface area is too small. I have similar problems buying litter boxes for Khan, because he needs a low opening that doesn't require any jumping, but because we have 4 cats I like to buy covered models. (We have 3 litter pans but they fill up fast.) Hmm..maybe I can get my man to build a litter box next...