Malm cat cabinet

Materials: Malm three drawer dresser, rented jigsaw, 4 hinges, hook and eye set

Description: With a child on the way in our small house, we had to move our litter box to the stair landing. That required building a new cat cabinet narrow enough to fit in the space but with some storage for all of the cat paraphernalia.

This is a two part hack: Malm cat cabinet and a sideways Billy bookcase storage cabinet (not described here) underneath.

We used a three drawer Malm dresser, though any size would work. The basic principle is taking out the bottom two drawers and converting it into the litter box space. We took apart an already assembled dresser and modified it, but you could start with a new one. The top drawer(s) remains regular a drawer.

1) Cut a whole the appropriate size for your cat out of one side with a jigsaw.
2) Remove the long piece of wood from the front that sits between the two drawers to create a large opening.
3) Disassemble two drawers and hinge the two drawer faces together.
4) Then hinge that drawer front unit to the frame above it.
5) Install a hook on the bottom part of the drawer front unit and attach a hook to the top of the dresser to hook the whole opening up when scooping.

The one caveat is that the Malm does not have a bottom. We needed a bottom, but you could easily just not have one if you wanted. To make the bottom for this, we took a top from another Malm dresser and nailed it into the frame. Regular plywood cut to size would also do just fine.

~ Diana, United States