Come on in! The entrance is under the sloping roof at the east side of the barn (on the left of the photo above). You'll find yourself in our office.
The
cats are waiting beyond this door and upstairs too.
Many of the cats are eager for someone to come and visit with them,
to give them a lap to sit in and some one-on-one attention.
Here's
a view from the largest of our four cat rooms. We provide lots of hidey
holes.
On the other side of the room is an L-shaped bank of cages for new cats. The cats spend a couple of days in these cages while they get accustomed to the room and its residents. The cages expand into 1 large cage or divide into 4 smaller ones.
From the cat room you can step out onto their porch (which has as
many hidey holes as the inside does).
In fact, you won't see several of the cats if they're either snoozing or hiding in one of the hidey holes. The feral cats hang out in the spaces we've provided along the rafters of the porch. The location was their choice. So we put beds and nests up there for them. Look upwards and the odds are good you'll see someone looking back at you.
When we leave this cat room have a look outside the back door. This
is where we do our washing. We have a pump that gives us cold running water.
We bring jugs of hot water from home. For a barn that had no washing facilities
at all, it's a nice little area. (Before the sink was installed we washed
dishes in a bucket on the floor.)
Caylee,
one of the volunteers on duty, is doing the dishes. Volunteers come by
daily to do the chores. They come when convenient for them -- first thing
in the morning or after work.... There's no set schedule for anyone to
be there so the shelter is closed to the public except for weekend Open
Hours (12:00-2:00 Saturday and Sunday). People who want to adopt but can't
make the Open Hours can set up a time to meet a volunteer there. Anyone
interested in seeing our animals and finding out about them before dropping
by can click on Our Adoptable Pet List on our
Petfinder page and see a complete listing of Katie's Place animals
currently available for adoption.
Here's a view of The Boys' Room. (We call it "The Boys' Room" because the residents are usually male.) These are the cats with Feline Leukemia (FeLV) and Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV). But you wouldn't know they had a chronic condition unless we told you. These cats are plump, robust and happy. They won't live as long as completely healthy cats but they enjoy life for several years.
The boys also have a porch. We access it from a door on the outside. They reach it through their window. These sweet fellows have little hope of being adopted into homes of their own. But it's a pretty good life for them here.
Let's go upstairs to see the two smaller cat rooms and the larger cages we use for new or recovering cats and cat families.
Here are a couple of views of the Penthouse. This room only had a window
for the first couple of years.
In the summer of 2005 we finally got a porch built onto their room for
them.
The window Tweek and Lester are looking through now lets out onto a
roomy porch.
These are views of the larger cat room upstairs.
In the summer of 2004 we finally found someone willing to build a porch for the cats in this pen. The cats just love it! To the left of the photo of their new porch, you can see how it looked before the porch was built. The door opened for fresh air but was screened so nobody could go out onto the roof.
The last feature we want to show you indoors are the larger cages we have upstairs. They're really too large to be called cages so we call them condos. There are two of the larger ones and two of the smaller ones. Cats that need to be alone for a longer period live there -- scared cats, traumatized cats, sick cats, or new families of cats.
Now if you'd like to go outside and see the bunnies' areas, scroll down for a few more shots.
This is one bunny habitat beside the Boys' Pen porch. Bunnies are assigned
areas according to which other bunnies they've bonded with (or don't fight
with).
The bunnies who live in the bigger bunny pen that you'll see next are mostly related to each other. We've taken both pet bunnies and feral bunnies. If they never get adopted, they have a nice place to live.
The view on the left shows the whole pen just after we completed it. We've covered it with heavy netting to protect the bunnies from owls and hawks. The view on the right is a close up of the inside. Later, we added a roof on the east side, over their hutches, so the hutches and some of their ground would be dry when it rains.
