Collapsing cat tree; terrible pain

The BBQ Pit
1

And what’s worse, the hamsters ate my post.

Here it is again (good thing I hit ‘copy’):

Imagine, for a moment, my living room. It is a lovely downtown apartment, and the living room is long and narrow. At the street side is a bay window with a window seat in it. After the window comes, on the north wall, a small desk which contains my computer and its paraphernalia. On the south wall, my cat tree. Idyllic, isn’t it? But like many such places, the coziness hides sinister lurking things.

It’s a marvelous cat tree. It is a series of carpet-wrapped cardboard tubes, with platforms every foot and a half or so, and it rises all the way to the ceiling, where it is anchored by a metal bar with a rubber cap at the top and a spring at the bottom.

It was $20 at Wal-Mart. It is tan. The cats love it.

Not five minutes ago, I was sitting here at my computer, reading ‘A Really Geeky Rant’ and eating a KitKat Dark (a wonderful idea whose time has more than come).

The tuxedo cat, Puck, was resting on the cat tree. My back, remember, is to the room, and I am facing the north wall.

And suddenly there is terrible pain from nowhere. It hurts so badly that I almost drop my KitKat Dark (which would be a terrible tragedy).

Yes, my floor-to-ceiling cat tree has somehow released its anchor, come crashing down, and hit me on the head. Puck ran away, then came back to sit on the window seat where he is now staring at his fallen tree with deep confusion. Cats don’t like change. I don’t like heavy things hitting me on the head unexpectedly. Neither Puck nor I is getting what we like tonight, though.

So I’d like to curse Wal-Mart, who sold me the cat tree. I’d also like to curse the people who manufactured it for 6 cents an hour in a cat merchandise sweatshop in Belize. I’d like to curse the person who built this building more than a hundred years ago, for if the ceilings were six inches lower then perhaps the thing would have stayed anchored. And I’d like to curse Gravity, without whom the cat tree would have hovered safely above my fragile noggin.

Darn you all. Darn you to heck.

And the question remains- it all happened so quickly, that there was pain long before there was comprehension of the cause of the pain. My back was to the cat tree. So how did it hit me on the nose?

Owie.

2

And don’t forget Mort Furd - had the “A Really Geeky Rant” thread not existed, perhaps you wouldn’t have been sitting there reading it. I mean…REALLY.

:: shakes tiny fist ::
:slight_smile: hope your schnozz heals quickly

3

I’ve got about a dozen of those Wal-Mart cat trees (I breed pedigreed cats and do rescue) - cheap and flimsy, but I’ve never had one fall. How high is your ceiling? If there was very little compression on the spring the tree may have been held in place more by friction than anything else. Since the shelves are centered, Puck’s weight on the shelf and slight shifting around could gradually work the top in one direction or another, until it reached a point where the spring pressure was released and it just toppled on over.

If that was the problem, it’s easy to correct by adding some sort of shim to create more pressure on the spring - an inch may be plenty, something like a large but useless book under the base would do it.

Can’t explain the nose thing, though. Was your hand anywhere near your nose? Maybe you accidentally whacked yourself when your head was driven forward by the attacking tree.

I wonder if Puck will consider this an adventure or avoid the tree from now on?

4

Yes, I do think that the problem was that the ceiling was too high. I had it shimmed up on a couple of books, but it’s an old ceiling with quite high ceilings. Maybe I’ll send in the mail-order form for the longer spring-rod when I replace it. It was old, anyway, and kind of broke in two when it fell. What can I expect from $20 cat furniture, I guess…

My working theory about the nose thing is that perhaps I heard the whoosh and turned just a little bit as it fell without realizing it.

5

Wal-Mart, you say? I’ll have to look into cat trees.

Because if my girlfriend’s undisciplined little beast claws its way up my leg ONE MORE TIME…

[sup]Sorry about your nose.[/sup]

6

I had one of those go over too. Max was on the cat tree, and jumped off. Crash, boom. The really sad part was it fell into my hanging shelf thing (one of those canvas straps and wooden shelves that hang) and everything on the shelf crashed and broke. Now I have a big, heavy, solid cat tree. Hasn’t gone over in the 9 years I’ve owned it - but the cats have shredded most of the carpet on the corners. I wish I knew how to re-carpet it, it has real tree limbs as supports, and the cats love it.

7

I’m amazed that my 25-lb cat hasn’t managed to knock over our 5-foot cat tree while defending it from his 8 lb mother and his 12 lb sister. We put an earthquake mat underneath it to keep it sliding around and smacking the wall when Tybalt hauls his fat ass into it. Then again, I think my 'rents paid more than 20 bucks for it.

Hope your nose and your cat feel better soon. :slight_smile:

8

You need to be examined by a doctor. A blow like that could give you catatonic schitzophrenia.
:smiley:

9

Did you smack your nose on your computer monitor? Check screen for snot trails.

10

Really good cat trees, like those Boscibo and Dragonblink mention, are incredibly expensive, sometimes costing several hundred or even thousands of dollars. You can make your own, degree of difficulty dependent on your skills, time, available funds, and how particular you are about it’s appearance.

The carpet is usually glued on with a hot glue gun, sometimes backed up with staples or upholstery tacks. Tunnels and those curved shelves are usually made from cardboard ‘concrete tube-forms’ that you can buy at something like Lowe’s or Home Depot. Lemmee see what links I can come up with . . .

If you’re the handy type, you can buy a very good, detailed book on building cat trees here:
http://www.tedstown.com/cattrees.htm

These are very solid, built with 2x4s and heavy plywood, attractive, and very economical if you use carpet remnants and can scrounge up unused plywood scraps from somewhere. Not too economical if you have to buy tools and things, and not practical to build in the living room of your apartment!

Do-it-yourself links:
http://amby.com/cat_site/cattree.html
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/5650/cattip/scratch.htm
http://serge.papierski.free.fr/Aother2.htm
http://www.nd.edu/~akolaczy/catladder.html
http://catsinternational.org/9_3.html (just a scratching post)
http://www.stretcher.com/stories/981001b.cfm (no plans, just descriptions/ideas)
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/5421/forest.htm

I’ve made several trees out of wooden stepladders, and another alternative is an old bookcase. Cut some holes in the shelves so the cats can climb through them, cover with carpet, and voila! Happy cats.

11

Getting whooshed is starting to have some serious consequences! :eek:

12

Yes, you could end up Puck’ed in the head.
And without a Grail, those FisherQueens just don’t heal.

13

I thought this was gonna be about a tree from which cats constantly collapsed and fell on your head. Bummer.

14

I have one of those but mine cost $80, was never very stable (each section tended to wobble from the rest, no matter how much I tightened it) and eventualy it came down and now is lying against some boxes in the basement, all limp and bendy.

I gotta go to Walmart.

15

You know, I seem to have the same problem with men . . . oops! :o We’re still talking about cat trees, aren’t we?