Our cat Ulysses is going on 12 years old. He's precisely as old as our relationship!
He was an indoor cat, and then an indoor-outdoor cat, and now he's back to being more of an indoor kinda guy as time passes. I guess the same thing tends to happen to people, too. This grandpa kitty isn't catching as many mice as he did in his heyday! We recently switched him to Rachael Ray™ Nutrish® Indoor Complete Chicken with Lentils & Salmon Recipe so he can get all the vitamins, minerals and taurine his little feline body needs as he explores the intriguing indoor jungle. The new cat food includes cool ingredients that he used to get outdoors, like dandelion greens, to help with healthy digestion. Rachael Ray created Nutrish without any by-product meal or fillers and donates a portion of the proceeds to her foundation to support forgotten pets who don't have someone to love them the way we love Ulysses.
When we're all home, the cat food has an effective yet unglamorous spot on the kitchen floor, in the empty spot where an old bar stool used to live. This works well enough, except when our toddler decides to “investigate” the bag and winds up chucking little chunks all over the floor.
I decided to solve this cat food storage dilemma AND make a fun space for our older kitty to play indoors.
I stapled some cat toys to the underside of a console table (if we still had the old bar stool that used to live in that under-counter space, that would have worked well too).
Voila! The bag's up off the ground and the cat has an easily-accessible play area.
He may be old, but he's still pretty feisty! This guy can play around with the best of them. He usually has all sorts of shiny trinkets strewn all around the house, so this cat console plays double-duty as a cat food corral and a clutter-free toy solution. Since ours has a lower “deck” that the cats hop up on to play, I'm thinking it may be a good idea to put a box under there to store additional things like catnip, brushes, etc. Some consoles even include a pull-out drawer that could make this serve as the perfect all-in-one kitty space!
It also works well on the patio, where we often set food out for friends and neighbors to feed the cats when we're gone. The tasty new food even lured in the elusive Ajax kitty, who normally isn't a big fan of the camera. We've had issues with mice trying to burrow their way into our cat food bags when they've been outdoors in the past, so it's a good idea to keep the food up off the ground whether it's inside or out. And this way, it's very visible and obvious where the food is by the front door so our housesitters can easily find everything they may need.
For more cat-friendly design ideas, check out these tips from HGTV!
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Rachael Ray Nutrish. The opinions and text are all mine.