How to build a gingerbread house for your cat

Happy holidays! It’s that time of year when your heart is filled with cheer and all you want to do is build a fort for your cat! Wait, that’s just me? Oh… Well, yeah, that’s what I did this weekend. You see, my good friends @talk_to_the_paw, @thesauerkrautkitty, and @_hobbes_  have an annual contest each year on Instagram. The goal? To build a tacky holiday fort for your pet. (Search #NeedsMoreTacky on Instagram to see all the entries!) Boots & Barkley™ makes the cutest cardboard cat houses and Target started selling them last year around Christmas time. I’m pretty sure the cats of Instagram community has been keeping them in business in that sense. I couldn’t even find a Christmas house last year–that’s how quickly they sold out!

Well, this year I was prepared. I even bought the Haunted House edition for Halloween and recently wrapped it in holiday paper, just in case I couldn’t find the holiday cat house. But Boots & Barkley one-upped me. They released TWO versions of the house–one in the form of a giant present and the other as an adorable gingerbread house. Of course, I bought them both.

So, now I had to set my plan of creating the world’s best cat fort neighborhood into motion. The present was really cute, but it needed a little something extra. So I wrapped that one up too, with the cutest wrapping paper I could find–cats in hats (also found at Target). It was a big hit with the boys, but I needed to make the gingerbread house just as fantastic.

I decided I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night than to cover the entire roof of the gingerbread house with mini marshmallows. Ben and Hugo helped. Well, mostly, they just wanted to bat around the marshmallows while I worked. I’m not going to lie to you–this task took several hours to complete. By the time I’d finished half of the roof, I was seriously doubting my commitment. But I pressed on.

I added a few more decorations from a local arts & crafts store to create the final result. What do you think? Hugo approves!

To complete the neighborhood, I added the redesigned Haunted House (also from Boots & Barkley–wrapped in holiday paper and covered with tacky snowflakes), some Catty Stacks, and a cat tunnel. #bestcatfortever