our life with three cats
This post is sponsored by Comfort Zone
All thoughts and opinion are 100% my own
i am so excited to announce my partnership with comfort zone, i truly love and swear by their products and have for years! as you guys know, i have many cats and i bring in new furniture pretty often, and we would not be able to have anything nice without comfort zone.
people usually don’t understand what the product is exactly when i explain it to them — they assume it’s some sort of cat nip type of thing. but it’s actually not that at all. comfort zone products mimic a cat’s natural pheromones to send them calming signals and help reduce unwanted behaviors, such as multi-cat tension, general anxiety, urine spraying and destructive scratching. the comfort zone diffuser just plugs into an outlet and is detectable to cats, and it makes them feel like they’re in a safe space.
all three of our cats are kind of stress balls in their own ways…
bodhi has always been our “scaredy cat” despite being gigantic and the only boy. he has been anxious since he was a tiny little kitten and always been a total mamas boy who would sleep and knead on me all day, or meow at me until i let him (he is sleeping on my arm as i type this). every time we’ve moved, he has been a complete wreck and when we moved into our house he stayed in a bathroom drawer for a day until i woke up to him on top of me screaming at 4am. now that he’s older, he’s finally a little calmer but he will always quickly skulk away to hide in a kitchen cabinet if a scary stranger is nearby.
lucy has always been brave and pretty confident, but if a vacuum cleaner is within ear shot, she will disappear. she is also apparently afraid of the outside world because one night she escaped when someone left our backdoor open after a party and she sat outside the door waiting for us to let her back in lol. she’s a good cat though, but her problem in life is rocky!
rocky has been pretty happy living with us, she loves to sleep in bed with us as i have shared many times, but she is always sleeping with one eye open because of lucy. so during the day she’s fine sitting on her perch in the living room, she is usually afraid to use the bathroom so a lot of times we have to escort her to and fro and as you can imagine with a baby, it’s a fun extra chore.
i posted about the terrible bathroom situation and our redesign of the guest room, but i still haven’t shared how we converted the cabinets for them because we haven’t really fixed the situation still. we got rid of the fancy robot, and we put two boxes in the guest room and one into our bathroom just for rocky — but rocky hasn’t really used hers whatsoever and bodhi (we think) is still going outside the two boxes, despite cleaning them regularly. i put diffusers in both rooms, so i’m hoping that helps! does anyone have any additional tips besides adding more boxes?! that didn’t work lol.
we used comfort zone diffusers a bit in the beginning when rocky first moved in, and we’ve used the spray on all our new furniture for years and years (like those new dining chairs they would normally be obsessed with but have totally left alone because of it) — but now because of this timely partnership, we’re going to make a real effort to try to remedy their behavioral issues. comfort zone not only makes a calming diffuser, but they also make a multi-cat one so i’m really hopeful that can help ease the tension a bit between the girls!
it was actually this partnership that helped me to decide to fix the bathroom situation and the guest room. i’m really hoping that if we stay proactive, and try to reward the girls when they are getting along, i think we can all be much happier together! especially gid because he’s the one who cleans the boxes… 🙂
We had a similar issue and found a lot of success with using Cat Attract litter.
I second this!!
this is very intriguing….do you notice a smell from it at all? their site says “OTHER INGREDIENTS 50%” which is a little concerning? do you have more info on what ingredients are in their products?
thanks from another 3 cat household!
Seconding the cat attract litter. My cat apparently had some outside the box issues before getting to me but we used cat attract (eventually switched over to other Dr. Elsey’s) and had zero issues. Also, my cat HATES a litterbox with a lid so we skip them! Good luck!
I recently purchased their spray for scratching to help keep my cat from scratching my leather sofa. I haven’t noticed a difference but haven’t been super consistent with it either. How long do you think it took before they stopped scratching?
We are now a 4 cats in an apartment household. Surprise kitten is new. We’ve found 4 boxes work, a combination of closed and open boxes. (One cat won’t use the closed ones.) I want to try Pretty Litter.
Yep, Cat Attract litter all the way. Otto gets destressed and used to go outside to box, but when the Cat Attract is fresh and clean I have zero issues with him doing that!
Ditto on cat attract! And we had to switch from a top-entry (which I wanted bc it was better looking and less messy) to a front entry, though my sister swears by open boxes — it’s the only thing that works for their four cat household.
I’ve only got one cat, but he does occasionally go outside the litter box in his old age (he goes into the box but not quite far enough and ends up peeing just over the edge, lol). Since he’s old and has kidney disease I’m not bothering with trying to fix the problem, so I bought a box of Amazon Basics puppy pads and put one just outside his box so when it does happen it’s at least super easy to clean up.
I have 9 rescue cats Kisses,Sugar,Sweet Pea,Scruffy,Opie,Jack,Abbey,Samson and Delila. I just love them all. My husband made a cat box room under the stairs . It works perfect. No cat box smell in the house . People come in and can’t believe I have that many cats because there is no smell Well that is until my Sweet little Jack started spraying!! I have put cat boxes every where and some have lids and some do not. I have different litter in each and have just started using the cat attract litter, I just saw your blog on the Comfort Zone so I am ordering it today. Will let you know how it works. Thanks
Hi There, thank you for your blog, I appreciate hearing from others family’s that love cats. I was a dog person before, ever since we moved to a good size apartment, other people move away and leave their cats behind. They always seem to show up at our front door. Both I and my roommate work hard at keeping the boxes clean, three times a day. We have 4 cats, over the years our rescues have passed away so we have much experience. I buy the plastic runners they sell by the foot at Home Depot and place it under our boxes. Yes, I’ve been told one box per cat, and they prefer a clean box. I only now buy the light /no dust litter that many markets now carry that is not too expensive. It helps so much me for scooping. I do not buy slide as I think is great but too expensive for my bank account. They say if your cat may be going outside of the box something else may be going on. I prefer to not buy scented litter, the only scent I sometimes buy is the lavender. In regards to scratching I have three small post that buy at the Orange County Fair and they are reasonable for price. Four cats can add up when you buy quality food ie Blue and they prefer Fancy Feast ocean whitefish and tuna feast not shredded. They all enjoy this flavor. Your litter box issue shouldn’t last too long. When it comes to furniture, I bought good high quality fabric to cover my sofas, the fabric is good for Summer or Winter. When I have company over I remove the cover ups, but it saved my sofa from being a big scratcher for 6 years. I’m sofa shopping now 🙂 My cats are indoor cats but they still seem to catch fleas, I use revolution that I buy from Australia and save much money vs buying from my Vet. I receive the same product. Thank you for your blog , Baby Boomer Cat Lady 🙂 Calif.
We also have 3 cats: Tabitha, our black alarm clock, that wakes us up as early as 4AM. That’s the time my husband used to get up when he was working. We’re both retired now, but they still wake us up! Ben is our orange tabby, soft & sweet. Joshua is the “new kid on the block,” just over 2 years old and acts like my 15 month old granddaughter. We have 3 litter boxes and they use all three. We feed Joshua separately because the other two are on “special diets,” but Joshua has figured out how to open doors, including sliding ones to closets! The older two are somewhat mellow, but Joshua is more active. I’ve discovered leaving my bedroom door only partially opened prevents them from using the hallway and other bedrooms as race tracks. My daughter and SIL have two cats and he uses a litter box that has a top, which he thought would make it easier to clean, but from what I’ve recently heard, it’s still a problem for the male cat using the floor instead of the litter box. We have told them that they need another liter box, but they have no room for it and if they did locate another one, it would be dangerous for my granddaughter.
We have a similar problem with a adult mother and daughter rescued breeder cats. The mother (zycheek )will not get down from her kitty condo if her daughter (Matilda) is out. She will stay 10 hours in the same spot if we let her. We have to actually pick her up and put her in a baby gated room so she will eat and go to the bathroom. The weird thing is Matilda isn’t aggressive. Zycheek will cause any fight if Matilda gets near her. We don’t know what to do. They lived together in the same room for 3 years before we got them. We have tried those plug in pheromone things and nothing works. It’s so sad because one or the cat has to be put up when we aren’t home or at night. I just wish they would get along .
I had one cat that was peeing on furniture; I tried everything and finally put him on Prozac which has worked.
Love the Comfort Zone plug ins! We are a four kitty household. We have 3 males and a female. The female gets very stressed out by her crazy brothers who wait to pounce on her after she uses one of the boxes. I have also added vertical spaces to help her in areas where she gets cornered. This really helps. Before you feel too bad for her, the males are 8-10 pounds each and she is an easy 20!!
Hi
Great post as I’m thinking of getting a cat again. It’s been a few years since we’ve had a feline and I’ve been watching cat advice videos on YouTube and just watched Jackson Galaxy- sort of a cat whisperer- about litter box issues. Look for it as he had some good advice. He did mention that you should have 1 extra box based on number of cats so for you it would be 4.
Good luck – love your photos your home looks lovely
Awwh such cute cats!
I now have 2 oversized litter boxes. Problem not totally resolved but dramatically reduced. I have oversized piddle pads as “entry mats” just in case. The boxes are triangular and fit in the corner. Also if you’ve had your boxes for a couple of years the residual odors on them may be why your kitty avoids them.
I’m going to HAVE to look into this for Tobi and all the traveling/moving we do! Giving him something that will help him feel calm. Thank you so much for sharing! 🙂
PS – where is your couch from?!