Adventures in Feline Topology

[akirlu]

This morning I went downstairs to check on the new cats only to hear a pathetic mewling issuing from the wall between the laundry room and the garage. I stepped over into the garage, and the sound seemed to come from under the floor beneath the downstairs toilet.

Here we commit a brief narrative pause to discuss the vagaries of plumbing. The thing about toilets is that they need several inches of clearance below floor level in order to have room to plumb the outflow pipe properly. If you're installing an after-market toilet on a concrete slab, your choices are to cut a big hole in the slab to put the pipes into -- expensive, noisy, and slow -- or build up a platform to create a raised floor under the toilet, with a gap between to accomodate the plumbing. Our predecessors in the house took the latter course. So the throne sits on its own dais. There's also some fairly heinous flocked wallpaper, but that's not relevant to our story.

It turns out there's a very small gap between the edge of the cabinet behind the toilet, and the platform box the toilet is built onto. Spike, who had previously been hiding out in the bottom cabinet, apparently managed to squeeze herself through that gap. God alone knows how. So now she was stuck in a sealed box under the toilet.

I spent several minutes attacking the platform with a hammer, mallet, and various other implements, trying to prise up a floor board, or at least some of the nails holding them down. Come to realize, the 'boards' are just a pattern printed on the cheap vinyl flooring, and the nails at the edge only hold the flooring to the hefty single sheet of plywood beneath it, and even if I did succeed in prying any nails up, the plywood platform itself his held together with woodscrews. Deep breath.

After some consideration, I applied myself to prying up the bottom shelf of the cupboard behind the toilet, instead. No better luck. Whatever else you say about the guy who did the home built cabinets and the garage toilet, he didn't do flimsy, knock-down work. Finally I figured that I either Spike would figure a way to retrace her steps and squeeze back out the way she had got in, or I'd have to go to the hardware store for a specialized drill-bit to cut a cat head-sized circular hole in the toilet platform. Either way, it would have to wait until after I rewalked the dog. At least.

I went back upstairs to collect the increasingly frantic Sarah and leash her up. While I was putting on my jacket, I heard more mewling downstairs. I opened the cellar door, only to find a very startled Spike making a calico streak back down from the top of the cellar stairs. Obviously, she could get back out on her own. Drama queen.

Tonight I'll be filling the damn gap behind the toilet. No idea what with. Marine foam, maybe. And possibly rethinking Spike's new name. Maybe we'll call her Astrophe.

Comments

[intelligentrix.livejournal.com]

My Harley did something similar when he was a kitten in Queens. I couldn't find him one night and looked and looked. I finally spotted a little black paw coming from the other side of the door to the utility room in the basement (he didn't and doesn't meow much). The problem was that we didn't have a key to that door as it was used exclusively by the landlord's crotchety old mother who lived upstairs. I figured out that Harley had managed to get into our bedroom closet (in the basement) and then up via the shelves to the space above the drop ceiling and thence to the other half of the basement. Rather than bothering the Old Bat upstairs, I ended up taking the door partway off its hinges--enough to create a kitten-sized gap that Harley could squeeze through. And then I kept the closet door closed at all times. Damned cats.

Calico

[u-must-b-joking.livejournal.com]

Of COURSE she figured out how to get out by herself. Nice moniker, btw.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Immediately before you fill that gap you will, of course, carefully ascertain the location of _all_ of the cats -- and not blink before the final sealing. ("Cats!" I say, with some disgust, while pondering what to do about the three feral kittens that have suddenly found hiding-places in my backyard Jungle.)