Renting With a Destructive Cat: What I Learned After Losing Half My Deposit

I got back half my deposit. The landlord was polite about it. We stood in the empty living room and looked at the wall together for a while, and there was not really anything to say, because the wall was covered — chest height down to the skirting — in the fine pale hatching a cat leaves when it lands hard against paint with its claws out.

Rollinn Living exists because of that wall. Not in a heroic origin-story way. More that I spent two years failing to solve a problem, and eventually got interested enough in why nothing worked to start making the thing myself.

It was not scratching. It was landing.

This is the part I misunderstood for most of the first year.

My cat is called Mei. She is a laser-pointer fanatic in a way I have not seen in another cat — completely, unreasonably committed. And the damage in that flat was not from her calmly sharpening her claws on a Tuesday afternoon. It was from play. A chase ends somewhere. The dot goes up the wall, she goes up the wall, and at the top of that there is a cat's full body weight arriving on a painted surface with all eighteen claws out.

So I bought scratching posts. Several. The cat used them, more or less, and the wall kept getting worse, and I could not work out why the two facts did not connect.

They did not connect because a scratching post answers a different question. A post is for the stretch — the slow, deliberate, look-at-me-marking-this stretch. It has nothing to do with where a chase ends at speed. I had bought a solution to a problem I did not have.

Things I tried first

All of them were attempts to make a place unattractive. None of them offered anywhere else to go, and I did not notice that was the pattern until much later.

• A prickly mat on the sofa. One of those plastic sheets with small nubs — not sharp, nothing that hurts, just unpleasant enough to sit on. It worked, in that she stopped getting up there. It also meant my sofa now had a plastic mat on it, which is not really a solution if the thing you wanted was a home you liked looking at.
• Plastic bags over the furniture. Same idea, worse. I lasted a few days before I could not stand the look of my own living room.
• A corrugated cardboard scratcher. And here is the thing — this one worked. She used it, immediately and enthusiastically. I stopped using it for a completely different reason: it sheds. Every session left a drift of paper crumbs, and I was vacuuming the same square metre every single day. I gave up on the one thing that was working, because of housework.
• Telling her off. I did try this, and it deserves a proper warning rather than a joke. It does not stop the behaviour; it teaches a cat to do it when you are not in the room. Which is worse than doing nothing, because you lose the information — by the time you see the damage it is a week old.

I only saw the pattern afterwards. Three of those four were about making somewhere bad. The one that worked was the only one that made somewhere good — and I abandoned it over crumbs.

What actually worked

The change was embarrassingly simple once I saw it. Put a surface where the chase ends.

Not where I thought a scratcher belonged. Not tidily in the corner of the room. At the foot of the wall she ran at — which, once I actually watched a play session instead of assuming, turned out to be the same small stretch of wall every time, because that is where the dot always ended up, because that is where I always stood.

She started bracing on it almost immediately, and the wall behind it stopped getting worse.

The second thing that worked was accepting that a pad is not only a scratcher. Watching our own cats, and hearing the same thing over and over from customers and friends, one pattern keeps coming up: a lot of cats simply like being on raw sisal. Not a catnip reaction — nothing that dramatic. They just choose it. Plenty of them sleep on a new pad for days before they ever scratch it.

That turns out to be the useful part. A pad your cat has adopted as one of its places is a pad that is there at the moment the claws come out. A pad that is only ever a decoy is a pad in a cupboard.

The constraints that come with renting

If you own your home you can drill, and this article is much shorter for you. Renting adds three limits that shaped everything we later made.

You cannot make holes. Which rules out most wall-mounted cat furniture on the market, because it is designed to be screwed into a stud.

You cannot repaint on your way out — not to a standard that survives a walk-through, and not in a colour that matches, because it never matches.

Anything you stick up has to come down. This is the one people underestimate. Plenty of adhesives hold beautifully and then take the top layer of paint with them when you leave — so you can solve the scratching and still lose the deposit. Matte emulsion, the standard rental finish, is the worst case: it is deliberately porous, which is exactly what makes it lift.

We wrote up the surface-by-surface version of this separately — which walls are safe, and how to take a pad off without pulling the paint. The short version is that a hairdryer for fifteen seconds is the difference between a clean removal and a repair bill.

The trick I wish someone had told me

You often do not need to stick anything to the wall at all.

The pad comes with a hook-and-loop fastener. Peel off the soft, fuzzy half and throw it away. Woven upholstery is a loop surface — press the hook half straight onto the side of your sofa and it grips, with nothing sticky touching anything, and it lifts off when you move.

Corduroy will not hold it; the ribs give the hooks nothing to bite. Neither will leather or a tight flat weave. Press the hook half against the fabric with your thumb — if it slides instead of catching, that sofa is a no. And on linen or anything loosely woven, test somewhere hidden first, because hooks can pull a thread.

Where that works, you have solved the sofa without the wall entering into it.

What I would tell myself two years ago

1. Watch one play session and note where it ends. Not where your cat scratches — where the chase stops. That is your first placement, and it is probably not where you would put a scratcher for aesthetic reasons.
2. Put something there before you buy anything else. A pad on the floor at the foot of that wall does more than a tall post in the corner.
3. Do the sofa with the hook half, not the adhesive. Ten seconds, reversible, no risk.
4. Save the adhesive for a door or a cabinet side, not matte wall paint. Same result for the cat, no conversation with the landlord.
5. Do not make the room worse to save the wall. Prickly mats and plastic sheeting work and they are miserable to live with. The point was always a home you like, that a cat can also live in.

Where the products came from

Everything we make now traces back to that wall in one way or another. The pads mount and lie flat because I did not know which my cat was until I owned one. They are raw sisal because that is the surface Mei chose to sleep on, and a surface a cat adopts is a surface that is there when it matters. The backing is anti-slip because a pad that skates on the first pull teaches a cat that the surface is unreliable, and you do not get a second chance at that.

And they are printed with designs we would put in our own homes, because the honest reason most people's cat furniture ends up in a spare room is that it is ugly, and a scratcher in a spare room protects nothing.

The pads are here, if you have a wall that looks like mine did.

Still working out where yours should go? The placement guide goes through it properly. Not sure whether your cat wants a wall or a floor? The damage already in your home will tell you.