Our den runs about twelve feet by fourteen, and by April it held a cat tree in the corner, a scratching post by the sofa, a window perch in the dining room, and not a lot of walking room. The floor was carrying everything. That is the problem wall shelves are meant to solve, and it is why Ray and I put up the FUKUMARU Cat Wall Shelves, the 4 in 1 set, on the long drywall wall in the back addition.
I want to be plain about what this set is before I make any case for it. The listing calls it a 4 in 1 and names the parts: a cat bridge, a wall bed, a scratching post and a shelf. It is engineered wood, jute and polyester, it mounts to the wall, and the listing says it is designed for US standard 16 inch drywall. Ray drilled into the studs on 16 inch centers, I held the level, and it took most of a Sunday morning. Here are ten reasons it earned that morning.
Four pieces on the wall, and the floor goes back to being a floor
The listing shows the assembled size, the mounting type, and what comes in the box. Worth reading before you pick a wall.
Amazon See the 4 in 1 set on Amazon →The whole set lives in about ten inches off the wall
Mounted, the deepest point of the set stands roughly ten and a half inches out from the drywall. The listing gives the assembled size as 28.2 inches long by 10.5 inches wide by 37.5 inches tall, and that matched what my tape said once Ray had it up. Ten inches is nothing. A floor tree needs a base wide enough that it will not tip, and that base is the part you walk around. The shelves take a strip of wall that was holding nothing but paint.
It uses height the room already had
Our den has eight foot ceilings and a long wall that ran from the woodstove to the doorway doing nothing at all. Cats climb. That is not a behavior I taught either of mine, it is just what June does when the bird feeder is busy. Putting her route on the wall means the vertical space in a small room finally counts toward the cats instead of sitting there above the furniture, gathering dust I could not reach.
Four pieces, one drill session, one level
I have assembled enough flat-pack furniture to know the number of pieces is not the problem. The number of separate mounting jobs is. The FUKUMARU set is one arrangement to work out, once. The instructions come in the box, the pieces are modular, and Ray had the whole thing on the wall before lunch on a Sunday. I leveled, he drilled, and neither of us swore at it, which is my honest measure of a kit.
June got a route that ends somewhere interesting
I am not going to tell you shelves stop a cat from climbing the curtains. I am not a behaviorist, and in our house June still climbs things she should not. What changed is where her climbing ends. The bridge runs to the wall bed, the bed sits next to the post, the post is beside the shelf. When she heads up now she has somewhere to arrive, and the top of the bookcase has lost most of its pull.
The bridge is a runway, not another perch
The bridge piece is the part I did not expect to matter. A perch is a destination. A bridge is a path, and June treats it like one, crossing at a trot on her way to the bed. If you have watched a cat balance along the back of a sofa because it is the only elevated line in the room, you already know why a length of walkway beats one more square platform bolted at the same height.
June crossed the bridge at a trot the first evening. Biscuit, at fourteen pounds, watched from the rug and went back to sleep, and the listing names small and medium breeds, so I never expected otherwise.
The wall bed is a sleeping spot that is not your sofa
Both cats sleep a great deal and both prefer to do it up high. The wall bed gives June somewhere to land that is not the back of the sofa and not the laundry basket. She is in it most afternoons now. That sounds like a small thing, but in a room where every square foot of floor is already spoken for, a bed that hangs on the wall costs you nothing you were using for anything else.
The scratching post sits where a cat actually stretches
The set includes a scratching post wrapped in jute, and it hangs on the wall rather than standing on the floor. June scratches it on her way past. The tall post we bought in January still gets the heaviest use, because it is the one she can get a full stretch into, but the wall post catches the passing scratch, and the passing scratch is the one that used to land on the sofa arm.
There is nothing to sweep under
This sounds like a small thing and it is not. The floor under the shelves stays clear. No base to shift when I vacuum, no carpeted platform shedding fibers into the corner, no toys trapped underneath where I cannot reach. The set is engineered wood with jute and polyester on the parts the cats touch, and a damp cloth handles it. I wipe the shelf piece about once a month, which is more often than I ever cleaned the old tree.
It fits a room that is already full
The den holds a woodstove, two chairs, a bookcase and the cat tree in the corner. There was no floor left to give. What there was, was wall above the chairs. That is the whole case for the FUKUMARU shelves in a small room, and it is why I stopped looking at taller trees. You cannot stack another footprint into a room this size. You can absolutely use the wall.
You can see them use it from across the room
The shelves sit at eye level from my chair. I can watch June work the bridge while I am reading, and I can tell at a glance whether anyone is up there. A floor tree in a corner hides a cat behind a post. A mounted set is in plain view, which also means I notice quickly if anything ever works loose. Ours has not, mounted into studs the way the listing describes.
What I'd Skip
Two things I would tell a friend before they order. First, this is not a set for a heavy cat. The listing names small and medium breeds, and Biscuit at fourteen pounds has never once been on it. He has the window perch and the stairs and he is welcome to them. If your cat is big, read the dimensions on the listing and think honestly about it. Second, we did not mount ours on the plaster walls in the old part of the house. Ray put it into the drywall in the back addition, into studs, which is what the listing describes. Old plaster is a different job and I would not guess at it.
And one more, because I read every listing and I expect you to: I would not buy this expecting it to fix anything. It is furniture. In our house it gave a three year old climber a better route and gave me back a strip of floor, and that is the whole claim. Anything about weight, joints or how much climbing is right for your cat is a question for your own vet, not for me.
If the floor is full, the wall is not
Four pieces, about ten inches of depth, one mounting job on standard 16 inch drywall. The listing covers the size, the mounting and what is in the box.
Amazon See the FUKUMARU set on Amazon →