Ignoring the way that DIY projects are never quite as quick and easy or inexpensive as you think, I ordered a couple replacement poles for the cat structure in our living room. Tibby, in particular, loves to scratch the sisal fiber, and after 4 years, it looks like hell.
Rather than rewrap the posts, which definitely would have been cheap, I spent almost what the structure cost to get new ones. When they arrived, I realized that swapping them out wouldn't be as quick as I thought, because I had to disassemble the whole thing.
The parts had been languishing for weeks when I decided on Saturday, that with school out, it was finally the day for the project. So I kicked Milo off the top platform and slid the enormous structure out of the corner. I had the top poles off and the middle platforms swiveled so I could reach the torn-up cylinders I was replacing when I saw that the connecting bolts were not the same size. The new ones were much narrower and would not fasten securely to the old posts.
Disheartened, I reassembled the thing, keeping one top bolt out, and shoved it back into the corner. Then I headed off to a big box home improvement store with both bolts in my pocket. There I stood long in the hardware aisle, comparing bolts and nuts and considering how best to adapt the misfit pieces. The only valuable thing I left there with was information-- I used the measurement display to identify the sizes of my bolts: they were 8 and 10 mm.
Not surprisingly, metric hardware is less common in US stores, which explained the dearth of options. At home, I searched the internet to see if there was some sort of adapter I could buy, and it was then I learned a new term, "step stud". Yes, friends, they actually make bolts that are one width on one side and another width on the other. I was able to order 4 from the world's largest online retailer, and I expect them to be delivered tomorrow.
Will they do the job? Well that remains to be seen, but they did add another 12 bucks to the cost, and of course, the time spent will be more than double what I originally hoped. But that structure is going to stay out of the landfill for a long time.
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