Giving Myself Enough Rope

Today was a laborious one. I spent much of it, rather more than I had anticipated, re-covering the taller sitting room cat-tree. This is one of the chores I wanted to do on my holidays; though it didn’t take all day, it occupied a large portion of it, and was not something I wanted to waste half a weekend on, when a weekend is all I have off. So it was done today.

I used sisal rope to cover the bare patches that various beasts have scratched on the tree, tearing away the carpeting that originally covered the central post. A difficulty I had long pondered was what to do about the spaces I couldn’t cover just by winding the rope around the post. Some bare patches are opposite a platform’s support, which connects the platform to the post diagonally, and rope would not wind well around such a slope.

I decided instead to loop the rope like a long piece of ribbon candy over the bare spots, nailing it on the perpendicular surfaces of the post on either side of the surface that was being covered. This seemed to suffice. The nails I used are u-shaped, intended to fix strands such as barbed wire to wooden poles.

What surprised me was the amount of rope required. I had two spools, each of fifty feet of rope, and bought a third this morning before the task was commenced. I used almost all of the three. There is nearly a hundred and fifty feet of rope on that tree! Still, $40 of sisal is a decent price compared to buying a new tree, and as this one is my custom-made seven-footer, I feel it’s a bargain. I have two more trees to rope, but those need much less work than the big one, and their bare spots will be repaired in the easier manner of simply wrapping the rope around a post.

Now, I just have to get the cats to stop scratching the corners of my chairs and use the newly renovated tree…