All duly noted and welcomed.
Or as my late husband used to say, “Dully noted.” 
Congrats on taking a hard step with foresight and courage! Everyone I know who has done this has been really happy with the change. Being surrounded by people near your own age can be freeing. They have each wound up with a comfortable cohort of friends, and overall enjoying life a great deal more.
With so many meals cooked for you, and the monthly maid service, you will be released from so much of the day-to-day drudgery of life. Welcome to life as a man! ROFL!
Just be sure to go outside every day. Its so easy to get cooped up in the building, but sunshine really matters. And once you lose the habit it can be really difficult to re-establish.
Crossing all things that this move goes smoothly and that it turns out to be Just Right for you!
A comment about your cats -
You may find the transition to indoor-only is actually easier because of the move. It will be a whole new world for them; new smells, different daily rhythms, different views out a window. With such a massive upheaval, staying in now might be just one more weird thing to wrap their furry brains around. Try to give them their familiar hidey holes that smell like home as their escape place, and if you have a door dasher maybe set up a spritz can (Ssscat) or scat-mat for a while so it’s not an interesting place to explore.
Good luck with it all!
This is a really good point. I can’t ignore the outdoors in my house because of all the windows, if only to go outside and do kitty round-up at night. There I might very well stay holed up in my second floor apt. I will have to go outside to go to the dining room.
Good point.
Okay… I finally figured out that by door dasher you don’t mean the person who delivers your takeout order, you mean a cat who will dash out of an open front door. EC can be that way, but I’ve also become adept at opening doors only a crack and using the eyes in the back of my head to see if she’s creeping up behind. When I see someone just standing with the front door wide open I cringe, partly because of the potential for dog/cat escape, but around here also because it lets mosquitoes into the house.
I never heard of the other two products… interesting. I’ll keep those in mind.
Checking in - update…
I won’t go into every detail about how challenging this sorting and clearing out is. Anyone who has ever moved can remember. 
I still have two weeks before the packers/movers come on Sept 5. I’m getting the key to the new place on Friday (Aug 25), so I will have access to the apartment the whole week of Aug 28. I might move a few things over, but I’ll still have plenty to do here. After I’m officially at the new address on Sept 6, the guy who’s going to take care of the estate sale will have until the end of Sept to accomplish that and empty the house before I give the key back to my landlord. On paper, that really looks good, right?
IRL I’m not able to sleep, I’ve got stuff strewn around the house in piles and plastic boxes, some to keep, some to sell, red and green dots on things, and I’m so, so sad. But that’s not the biggest concern at the moment.
TL;DR. I’m afraid I won’t be able to find one of my cats, come moving day.
My calico cat Tikva is not coping well with the disruption. She has always been a burrower-- she’s one to go in a closet and hide all day, especially if there’s someone besides me in the house, or if there’s rain/thunder (we used to have those occasionally… 
). Well, she hasn’t come into the house for the past two days and nights. She may have sneaked in when I wasn’t home (kitty door) to grab a bite but she is spending all her time in the backyard or under the house (verified on the camera I put back up after raccoons knocked it down).
This behavior is not unprecedented. Ever since I adopted her as a kitten, about every six weeks or so, she’ll pull an all-nighter. I’ve never gotten used to it. She has always rejoined the household. She can be very affectionate. She sleeps with me, even when I nap. She sits on the sofa leaning up against me, although I’d never call her a cuddler. She gets up on my desk and rests her head on my left hand while I’m on the computer. But when she’s in one of these standoffish moods, there is no way to corral her. If she’s in the backyard at night and I go out to call her, sometimes she’ll come in and other times she will run to within a foot of the kitchen door and then make a sharp right turn, run, and jump over the fence! Like some kind of demon cartoon cat. 
I do plan to board both of them on the two moving days, taking them in early on Sept 5. Which means she has to be in the house the night before moving day so I can put her in the carrier the next morning. I can keep her inside for a couple of days before that as insurance, but first she has to come into the house. Will she come in today or not? Who knows? If she’s outside, I can’t corral her. She will run. I can’t see keeping her in for the next two weeks. If I tried that and she did get out and went under the house, who knows when she’d come out? Why don’t I close up the opening where she goes under the house, you ask? Because then she will surely find somewhere else to hide and I won’t have any idea where.
The house is going to become even more disrupted in the next two weeks. So this is bothering me more than even the organizing and sorting that I’m engulfed in and overwhelmed by. And that’s already plenty.
The very first time she comes in the house, capture her. I suggest you rig the cat door now as a one-way trap so it won’t open outwards. Once captured, put her in a crate for the duration or take her to the boarding place early.
She won’t be happy, but she’ll survive a week or two of captivity. The alternative is far far worse for her, and for you. Good luck!
that is a toughy. the other option is to put her into a room where you have mostly cleared. make it a nice room of tranquility.
When I posted, what you are suggesting seemed impossible. Now I can see that it is absolutely the only way to make sure this goes without a hitch. Not boarding that long, but I can keep her in the house.
@rocking_chair There is no cleared room or potentially cleared room. But I can confine her to the bedroom. Mostly.
Find out where you can get a havahart trap on short notice in case it’s necessary. That might work if she gets outside.
And yes – you’re going to have to shut her in sooner than you expected. And you’re going to have a really upset cat for a while. Sad – but with you is still the best chance that she’s got.
Maybe someone has a larger dog crate to hold her in for a while. You could have enough room to put a litter box in with her/him/it. I saw someone put a smaller cat carrier in a cage like that because the cat was more comfortable going into the carrier. It’s too late for retraining now so you and the cat just have to survive this move. I’m sure both of you will be uncomfortable with the situation for a while but I’m looking forward to hearing how you’ve both settled into the new situation. I’m sure that will take a little while, but we’re here when you need to unload.
You can only keep her in the house if there is never an open path of doors between where she is and the outside. She will be highly motivated to bolt after a day locked in the e.g. bedroom, much less 14 of them. So every time you open any door with the cat on the other side, she’ll be hell bent to escape past you. And will probably succeed at least once, if not nearly every time. Now leaving you with the cat on the loose in a larger and more disrupted area with many more palaces to hide. And you trapped in that same area where you don’t dare leave for fear of her getting past you out another door.
So you now must recapture her before you can exit the house or hallway or wherever. And capturing (I first typoed catpuring, which is funny) her will be even harder this time because she’s even more wary than last time.
I don’t see a happy ending other than crating her the very first time she comes in and never opening the crate door until she’s at the boarder’s place or at your new place. All else is simply setting up for an even more paranoid more upset cat to get loose later in your process. Which is a losing plan.
Best of luck! Seriously, not snarkily.
Tikva isn’t really a dasher-- she’s more of a burrower. If I put her in the bedroom, she will likely go in the closet and stay there all day. She often does that anyway. So this is doable.
One of the positives about my Craftsman-style house (which some see as a negative) is that there are doors (that close) to every room. Sometimes two. In this house there is
for cats or people. If I need to go out in the back yard and don’t want cats to follow, I close both kitchen doors. A friend who took care of my cats when I was away one time used that method to make sure nobody escaped.
I also have a pretty large crate in the garage (I had the use of a two-car garage here…. ) that I used for a cat that was ill (now, sadly deceased).
Burrower is good. Dasher is … less good.
But the point still remains that if you’re not 1000% certain she’s hiding in the bedroom you don’t dare open a door to the outside. Even if you’ve closed the kitchen door on the way out into the backyard that’s only safe if your 1000% sure she didn’t slip into the kitchen unnoticed two hours ago.
You know your cats and I sure don’t. Happy cat-ranching!
I will be able to see if she is hiding in the kitchen. I just want her to come in today so I can start detention.
I own a havahart trap from my time living in the country, but Tikki would never fall for that. Food is not a motivator.
This mat just arrived that I ordered from amazon for outside my apartment door.
I like that layout of your current house. Easy to see why you’re unhappy to leave it.
Sorry that the havahart is yet another suggestion of mine that won’t work! – and hoping that Tikva comes in soon.
Will she take to detention better if the other cat’s shut in with her the whole time, or would that make it worse?
@LSLGuy is smart, because they agreed with me (in advance, which makes them smart-ER) - I was going to say the same thing, snag 'er and bag 'er ahead of time. Although there will be much short term hate, it’s safer for all.
My vet keeps recommending feliway for our hyper cat, but it didn’t do much if anything, and the other cat just sat around licking the dispenser. It’s also pricier than I like, but it -might- be a good idea for the 2 weeks before and after the move. May. Others can chime in if they think it’s worth the price.
i do love a craftsman. they were so well thought out, and the woodwork! so gorg.
Your heart is in the right place, and I love you for it!
I’m not sure. They barely tolerate each other. But I probably should be keeping EC in more, too.
I tried feliway when I moved here for the cats I had then, both now gone. I don’t think it helped. But I am going to be taking a small carpet from here and putting it in the closet that will be the Kitty Zone. It has 10 years of familiar smells.
You said it!
I’ve had a few speculative looks, but the sharks keep their distance. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be of much use to any of them, anyway.
I’m going to get back to doing this as soon as the heat abates. I feel like a pasty-faced shadow of my former self.