If you’ve been following along with the Hauspanther Instagram stories, you may have seen the catification project we’ve been working on for some friends. This fun cat door makeover was a new challenge but I’m thrilled with how it turned out! I wanted to share some of the details in case you ever have a similar situation.

My friends Gerda and Jose (you may have seen their cat superhighway in Jackson’s and my first book, Catification) have a lovely catio at the back of their home but the door leading out to the catio had a huge dog door in it, much bigger than they needed for their cats. You can see above how they had rigged a smaller opening but they wanted something that looked nicer.

The aim was to install a smaller cat door but in order to do that we needed to cover the large hole in the existing door. We decided to create plywood covers on both sides of the door and inset the new cat door in the plywood. I figured why not have some fun with the design of the plywood so I came up the idea of a cat head on one side and a cat butt on the other!

Gerda and Jose love to scuba dive, so I chose a bright Caribbean pallet for the door and trim with a black cat silhouette, since several of their cats are black. They also have several cats with ear tips so they requested an ear tip on the cat silhouette.

My fantastic husband, Mark, went to work bringing my design to life. He cut the shapes from plywood and finished them off beautifully. He inset the new cat door in each piece and sealed the edges so there aren’t any gaps.

We took the pieces over to Gerda and Jose’s house and tested them to make sure everything fit properly. With just a few adjustments we were ready to paint the door and trim.

Once everything was painted we installed the panels and added the finishing touches. All the cracks were sealed with caulk that dries clear and we used several coats of top quality semi-gloss paint to allow for easy cleaning.

The door is now a fun and functional piece of art that everyone can enjoy!

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