Charlie and Lola, our 2 kittens, are growing up pretty fast. it only seems like yesterday that we were bringing them home in a little cardboard box for the first time and now they are roaming the garden.

With this new-found freedom came some inconvenience for us humans, as they need to get in and out at regular intervals. As is is now well and truly autumn, leaving a door open for them was certainly not an option and getting up and down to let them in and out was way too much like hard work.

So, we finally relented and bought a cat-flap.

For me, nine times out of ten DIY is not a straight-forward job. What should be a 10-minute task generally turns into a full day of cutting, sawing, sticking, drilling, cursing and swearing, punctuated by several trips to the DIY shop to buy the vital tools, screws, sticking plasters etc that turn out to be essential for the job. So I was hoping for a change in fortunes with this one…

First task of the day was to draw round the template provided.

This revealed the first fatal flaw in the plan…the door has panels, and the cat-flap was just too wide to fit inside one of the panels. So I was going to have to cut out some of the panel surround to fit it in, Now it was starting to feel like one of my normal DIY jobs…

Unperturbed, I carried on with the job in hand, drilling the holes and cutting out the space for the flap to fit into. This bit went ok thanks to the trusty jig-saw, although from now on the pressure was on to complete the job before night-fall!

Next came the cutting and chopping to make the frame fit. Generally I hate working with wood as i always seem to lose control of it and end up cutting too much off, or splitting the wood in the wrong place, or cutting at the reverse angle and wrecking the only materials I have. However, with hammer and chisel, this time i managed to avoid all the usual pitfalls and actually cut out a good snugly-fitting hole for the frame to fit into.

Okay so it may be a little rough round the edges, but aren’t we all?

As you can see, it was well and truly dark outside by the time I finished, but finish I did!

So now we just have the somewhat-more-taxing job of trying to persuade the kittens to use their nice new private entrance, rather than whining at the window.

At the moment, we have to come to the door to hold the flap open as they haven’t yet figured out that they can open it themselves. And the noise it makes as it swings shut tends to scare them off…but they are starting to get the hang of it. Hopefully they will soon be coming and going without any assistance, and then we’ll never know where they are!