# Cat scratching door jambs



## csdude55 (Nov 15, 2018)

Someone touched on this on another thread, but I didn't want to take it off topic so I'm posting this one.

My Mojo has always loved to scratch up my door jambs! Sometimes he'll go after the drywall, but he really likes to dig his nails in to wood. I've tried everything I could think of to stop it, but nothing worked... citrus spray, scratching posts, spraying him with a water bottle to make him stop, etc.

After about 13 years of just accepting it, I finally had a cheap and easy solution pop in to my head... I went to Lowes Hardware and bought 1-linear-foot strips of cheap carpet that matched the color of my door jambs, cut them to about 3' long, and used a staple gun to cover the lower half of the door jamb (with the staples in the corners).

Now he can go after the door jambs all he wants without doing any real damage! The carpet blends in and looks fine, I have plenty of scrap left over so I can replace it if he tears it up too much, and after he's gone it will be nothing at all to remove the staples and paint over the little holes.

The whole project cost about $12 and took about an hour of work to fix my whole house :-D


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## eldercat (Jul 3, 2015)

That's a clever move! And Mojo likes the carpet just fine? It was the *location*, not the wood of the doorjamb? 

When I had a scratching problem I found a piece of tree trunk and brought it in for the cat to scratch. Worked pretty well.


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## csdude55 (Nov 15, 2018)

I think that maybe he just got used to the location, or maybe the stretch upward. But I've spent hundreds of dollars on different cat trees that go unused... I have them in wood, in carpet, and in rope. He'll jump up on them, but never scratches them.

But carpet on the door jambs, he's good with that!

A raw tree trunk would be a good one to try, too. I thought that it could just be the finished wood of the cat tree that he didn't like, but he had no problem with the door jambs being painted so that was just a guess.

But shoot, it's a cat... who knows what that little alien is thinking!! lol


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