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I love my cats. Stitch is always there to purr a bad day away and Dharma’s “PET ME NOW!” meow is a delightful tidbit of high maintenance. Despite my love for my companions, I’ve always been bothered by their bathroom habits. You see cats like to use the restroom all the time. I only feed them for 20 minutes a day, but once an hour little Dharma pads into the litter box turns around three times and carry out her business. As you can imagine this creates a bit of a litter-logistical nightmare.
For the past year or so I’ve been working with various litter box designs trying to find one that the cats will use while also being as inoffensive to the olfactory nerve as possible. The first iteration was littermate cat box that worked o.k. for several months until catching fire. Then I tried a litter round up. Sadly, poor mr. stitch was too big for it. Often he would have the best intentions of using the cat box properly, but his back end missed.
Last month while they were on clearance I picked up a new littermate box. No more problems with stitch being to big. I still struggled with the annoyingly small size of the litter receptacles. With two cats, I found the litter receptacles full on an almost daily basis.

Then it hit me. Why use a litter receptacle at all? When I swapped them out I put the full containers in the trash. Why not just use a trash can? Yesterday afternoon, Bryan and I put the litter box on top of an old printer box, modified a litter receptacle to act as a funnel, and put a new liner in the good ‘ole trash can. After a few test runs, and the addition of some activated charcoal pads around the trash can, as well as a fresh bit of litter, Dharma rang in the new cat box with her typical nonchalance.