Top 20 DIY Projects of All Time: #20 Recycled Cardboard Cat Scratcher

by Grace Bonney

Starting this week we’re revisiting our nearly 20,000 post archive to share our community’s most beloved (and most popular) posts by category. Yesterday we shared the beginning of our Top 20 Home Tour list and today we’re starting with do-it-yourself, or DIY (I still get asked what that means!), projects.

This category was one of the very first sections we added (with our first DIY editors, Derek and Lauren from The Curiosity Shoppe!) and for that reason it will always make me happy. It was the first time I learned how to ask people to join our team, how to set up and pay people for their hard work, and how to share our love of DIY culture with the broader world. From inexpensive IKEA hacks and easy dorm room upgrades, our DIY posts celebrate the everyday materials we all love and have around the house and turn them into glorious home decor (sometimes practical, sometimes purely decorative). And what makes me so happy about this Top 20 is that even after all these years of online content becoming more polished, these projects (which are decidedly more humble and low-budget) still won out as the most read and shared. Here’s to really keeping it DIY! Let’s get started with the countdown… xo, Grace

#20: DIY Recycled Cardboard Cat Scratcher

Who Made It: Kate Pruitt (our DIY editor from 2009-2012)
Where: Oakland, California
DS debut: January 2009

I cannot express how happy this project makes me. It is one of the simplest projects we’ve ever run, but it was one of the most popular of all time. It also makes use of a material we all seem to have around the house: cardboard. Cats love these sorts of toys and they can easily be dressed up with some decoration around the outside if you want to get fancy. If there’s one thing I know from going through all of our most popular posts from the past 15 years, it’s that our readers LOVE pets.

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