Art Attack! #100: Making a Cardboard Cat House! 😺🏠

Hey Hive!

We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!

But since this is the 100th Art Attack post I'm doing, I thought I'd do something a little different and write about a craft project my friends and I worked on last year! Back in Jan 2021, my friend proposed that we make a cat house out of cardboard since we had a lot of cardboard boxes from moving into our new house!

My friend Kai and I are huge fans of the cat collecting game, Neko Atsume, so we wanted to model the cat house after one of the houses from the game! Ultimately we decided on this one since it seemed pretty easy to emulate:

Source: nekoatsumeguide

And turns out this actually does exist in real life because there are some Neko Atsume merchandise you can buy online so you can design your own house to look like Neko Atsume too!

Source: grapee.jp

Of course this was quite some time ago so I'm not sure if you could still get them now, but I thought it was so cool these actually existed! So we knew it was definitely possible to make it ourselves and it should be pretty doable too.

None of us had ever made a cat house before, so we had to draft it out first with some smaller boxes we had to try and figure out how we were going to turn this IKEA box we had into a house with a roof.

We figured it would probably be easier to just do a clean roof without it sticking out of the box so we could just use 2 of the flaps as the front and back of the roof and cut out the other 2 flaps to make the sides.

So after taping the front and back flaps to a rectangular piece to form the top of the roof, and approximately measuring the side flaps, we cut out the excess with a pen-knife.

And we ingeniously thought up a technique so that it could tuck the side flaps into the main part of the roof.

So that it looks really neat and clean like this! I think there's a Japanese technique that is similar so that you don't have to use tape but I don't really remember the name of it unfortunately.

We were actually pretty proud of how it looked and we were basically done with the difficult part of the house it seemed!

The only problem was the top of the roof could collapse if a weight was on it so we wanted to make sure it could at least support a cat's weight if it decided to jump on the house. To do that, we reinforced the inner part of the roof with more cardboard sections strategically stuck with duct tape to give it more structural integrity.

Once that was done, we cut out a circular hole on the side of the box as a door. We decided against the door on the side like the Neko Atsume one since we wanted the house to be able to shield against the cold winds.

After cutting out a window on the front, the construction of the house was basically complete and all that was left to do was decorate it!

My friend Kai had some red acrylic paint so we painted the roof of the house red just like in Neko Atsume! Then it was time for the details and we didn't want to get paint on the floor by accident since we didn't have newspapers, so we went to the bathroom to paint. She painted a black outline around the little window we cut out on the side and also around the roof just like in the game.

Because we were going to leave this out in the open for the stray cats to use during the colder weather, we didn't want anyone to take it so we also wrote a cute message on top of the roof too!

This was back in early Jan 2021 when Singapore was having unseasonably cold weather and it was raining for the whole of December. So we kinda got the idea to make a cat house for the stray cats just like some other kind citizens!

Source: mothership.sg

But of course you could never be too careful since the cleaners might still throw it away if the cats left it unattended so we made sure to write a message.

Then it was time to add the finishing touches:

We painted some paw prints and cute fishies in white:

And after some final touches, we were done!

This was the door to the cat house:

And this was the side of the house with a window! And we even added a little extra awning too, made out of the window piece we cut out!

I thought it looked so cute and for our first time making a cat house it looked pretty legit! We gave ourselves a pat on the back once we completed it!

Kai put in some old clothes inside the house before leaving it at a void deck below her grandparents' house since there are always a couple of cats there. It did spark some interest from the local felines who came to check out the new accommodations:

But I think they were pretty skeptical of it still and none of them went in, sadly.

I think we needed to give them a few days to get used to the house. I hope now the house is home to a very appreciative little kitty!

It was a very fun project to work on together and also helped us save the environment since we recycled a perfectly good cardboard box! We also had an enjoyable time doing arts and crafts together so it was an afternoon well spent! If you have stray cats in your neighbourhood, I recommend doing the same if you have boxes just lying around!

Thanks so much for reading!