DIY Halloween Cat House

We have a new kitten! His name is Oberon and he's an 8-month old Sphinx. We love him to death but like a lot of kittens, he's a rambunctious little guy and he's got a particular proclivity for destruction of personal property. 😅 We decided we needed to make a cat scratching post for him and got inspired to go a step further and make a combination DIY cat house and cat scratching post!

We strongly recommend watching the video above
and following along with the written steps!

Since it's also giant Halloween jack-o-lantern, it will double perfectly as a nice piece of DIY Halloween décor. 🎃 You could also use the same techniques to just make a giant jack-o-lantern and ignore the rope if you just want a nice Halloween decoration for your house!

• 3mm Wire - https://amzn.to/3iGJIeR
• Blue Tape - https://amzn.to/2VLlvv4
• 36" Balloon - https://amzn.to/3lYhrmj
• Newspaper and Paper Bags (Paper Mache)
• Wood Glue - https://amzn.to/3iKWCc5
• Total Boat Resin - https://amzn.to/3CJvPVm
• Orange Spray Paint - https://amzn.to/3xJDXRZ
• Black Spray Paint - https://amzn.to/3iFqNBo
• Orange Dye - https://amzn.to/3sg5sli
• 3/8" Sisal Rope - https://amzn.to/2UfcH09
• Hot Glue - https://amzn.to/3jL0clG
• Hot Water

TOOLS USED:

• Wire Cutters - https://amzn.to/3ABX5Dm
• Pliers - https://amzn.to/2UdFy4S
• Snips - https://amzn.to/3sbXr0C
• Hot Glue Gun - https://amzn.to/3xMDe2q
• Scissors - https://amzn.to/3iFsvCO
• Sharpie

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The general idea is we're going to blow up a giant balloon, paper mache over it, then cover it with rope. Easy right?! Well, if you watch the video, you'll see we had several prototypes that did NOT work. 😅 The idea that ended up working was using some 3mm wire to build a metal cage and then blow up the balloon inside it to create the "pumpkin" shape.

To build the cage, we first measured Oberon and figured out the general size we wanted the pumpkin to be. We then cut 3 long pieces of wire to the right size which for us was 70". To cut the wire, we first scored it with wire cutters and then bent it back and forth with pliers. Easy!

Next, we bent each wire into a rough pumpkin shape, with a sharp bend in the middle that will eventually be the top of the pumpkin where the stem is.

To connect the tops of the wire, we used a smaller wire and wrapped it around a few times where the two ends came together. We then bent the ends of the thicker wire up so it couldn't slide out. We were not particular about the exact size of these, in fact we purposely made them a little random to give the pumpkin a more organic shape.

With all three wires ready to go, we put them together and rotated them into an even spread and then attached them together with the smaller wire, taping the ends with blue painters tape to hold the angle and cover and sharp edges.

Using an air compressor on a low pressure, we held the 36" balloon inside the cage and then slowly blew it up. (You could definitely do this without an air compressor, it will just take a bit longer.)

This was a relatively simple step, it was just a bit tricky to hold the balloon without your hand getting squished as it got bigger. 😀

We also used blue painters tape on the ends of the wire and around the thinner wire to ensure no sharp edges were rubbing against the balloon. It would have been a huge problem if it popped in the middle of the next step so we had to be extra careful!

Once it was blown up as much as possible, we tied it off!

To make our paper mache mix, we used wood glue and water. Wood glue was recommended to us by the amazing crafters on our Discord Server as a good option for this since it tends to be more durable than normal white glue. It also can dry quickly which was helpful.

Want to join our Discord Server and chat with our makers?
Here's the link: https://discord.gg/MtrHrxa

The first layer was regular newspaper which went right over the balloon and metal wire. When the first layer was done, we did a second layer of brown paper bag which was also a recommendation from Discord! It's sturdier so we'd hoped it would create a more solid structure.

If you're watching the video, you know this didn't work out that well. We should have done many more layers of paper mache! If you build this, we'd recommend at least 3-4 layers, letting each one dry before moving onto the next. We came up with a solution in the end to make ours sturdy but in hindsight we should have been patient and done more paper mache layers.

Even with just the two layers, it took about two days to dry completely.

While the paper mache dried, we went forward with dying our rope! We used 3/8" sisal rope and after estimating our pumpkin size, we actually needed 500 feet of it! Amazingly, we were not far off in the estimate and only had about 20' left over.

We used an orange fabric dye which mixes easily with hot water. We then put our five bundles of rope into the container and let it sit overnight.

The next day, we took it outside and rinsed everything off and let it dry. The color was PERFECT!

Our pumpkin was finally dry, but we found we had two problems at this stage:

#1
We put our pumpkin outside in the warm sun to hopefully dry faster. The heat caused the balloon inside to massively expand and it ripped the bottom as it expanded. This wasn't a big deal because we ended up cutting off most of the bottom anyway, along with the metal wires, but still something to watch out for!

#2
After popping the balloon, the paper mache was not very sturdy. It was kind of flimsy and was not going to support the weight of the project. We should have done more layers! See previous step. 😅

We decided though we were done with paper mache and solved it in a different way.

This project was inspired by Evan and Katelyn's "Catcus" build, and they had a very similar problem and solved it with resin! This seemed to make sense to us as well so we mixed up some resin and ended up doing two coats.

We did two coats on the outside and one on the inside (after removing what was left of the balloon).

If you're patient enough, we think a few more layers of paper mâché would have been fine. Resin isn't something everyone will have but for us it was the path of least resistance.

We needed a way to get the bottom to be flat so it would sit nice and flat on the ground. We taped a sharpie to a little angled piece of plastic, placed it on the bench, and then spun the pumpkin around to create a straight line. We then cut around the line with snips/scissors and it created a perfectly flat bottom!

This worked better than expected. Given the odd shape of the pumpkin, we expected it to be a little harder to get a nice straight bottom but this technique worked perfectly.

One of the most important elements of the jack-o-lantern is the face! There are SO MANY styles and ways you can make a jack-o-lantern face so we spent quite a long time trying to get ours right. We did searches for lots of different styles, sketched ideas, and really took our time (several hours...) of sketching different ideas on the pumpkin to get the look and size right.

During this stage, we also used orange spray paint (outside) and black spray paint (inside) and painted the whole thing! This is so if any areas show through once the rope is on, you won't really notice anything underneath the rope.

Once we got the "happy" style right, we then sketched a dotted line around the outside of our drawn face to represent the rope. The rope is fairly thick and is going to wrap around the edges, which means the final hole will look smaller due to the rope. We had to extend our actual cut line to be wider than the hole he wanted to account for the thickness of the rope.

From there, we used snips to cut out on our lines and all was well.

At this stage, we're ready to hot glue the orange rope to the outside of the pumpkin! We had two main options: horizontal or vertical. Wrapping the rope horizontally would have probably been easier but we were afraid we'd lose some of the definition in the "pumpkin" shape. So, we decided to wrap it vertically. This would keep a lot of the shape but meant we had to cut HUNDREDS of individual pieces of almost 500 feet of rope. This was..........tedious. But, it worked wonderfully!

Using a hot glue gun, we cut individual pieces of rope and glued them on, following the contour of the pumpkin. At the top, we left room for the stem, and at the bottom we left enough extra rope to wrap it around onto the inside of the bottom edge.

Since the pumpkin is not a perfect cylinder, it means it's wider in the center and the rope ends need to come together at the top and bottom. To solve for this, as the ropes came together we cut the ends at an angle and kind of "braided" them together one piece at a time, alternating sides. This created a really beautiful pattern and the texture of the rope hides any issues.

All in, this took us a LONG time but we couldn't be happier with how it came out.

(Note: This was also the stage where Oberon grabbed it and toppled it off the counter, smashing the face!! We fixed it with tape. See video for more details here.)

For the stem, we used a 3/4" sisal rope that was a dark brown color. We fashioned a stem shape with the metal wire and then hot glued it to the top. We then worked the rope around the wire.

At the bottom, we unraveled the rope and spread it out to create the base of the stem, wrapping it around to create an interesting looped pattern to give it some more definition.

Originally we'd intended a much simpler stem, but we found this rope and got inspired and it ended up being one of the nicest parts of the project. It's a great example of how being a bit free with your ideas and willing to try things can often end up to incredible and unexpected results. :)

This started out as a simple bit of inspiration and we honestly thought it would be a relatively simple project. It turned into a month long epic that ended up being one our longest videos/projects to date. 😅 We learned a lot and ended up with an absolutely beautiful piece.

DIY is often a labor of love. It would have been so much easier to just buy a scratching post and call it a day, but Oberon loves it, our kids think it's the coolest thing, and it puts a huge smile on Jaimie's face. All that makes every minute worth it. :)

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