By Gene and Katie Hamilton

When our cat Samantha Bee is in the mood for a good scratch, she paws at her scratching post with great enthusiasm. Like any indoor cat, she doesn't have a tree to climb and needs some other way to give her claws a workout. A scratch post provides an opportunity for her to do that and keeps her from shredding draperies and the corners of upholstered furniture. We rub dried catnip leaves on the post and it drives her wild.

A variety of scratching posts are sold at pet stores, and you can find them online by typing cat scratching post in a search engine. Choose a post with a sturdy base that's high enough to let your cat get a good stretch. A typical post covered in a rough surface like sisal rope or fabric that stands 32-inches high will cost about $65. If you have a scrap piece of plywood for the base and a couple of feet or 4-by-4 lumber for the post, you can build it yourself. You can also use two pieces of 2-by-4 lumber nailed together to form the post. Sisal rope can be found in large home centers, and sisal fabric is available by the yard on the Internet. You can also use scrap pieces of carpet. But if you must purchase all these materials, which can run at least $30 of more, your saving quickly shrinks. This is one project where the enjoyment of building it yourself should be your motivation, since you may not actually save much.

Here's instructions from Happy Pet Post How to Make a Cat Scratcher from Scratch.

See PurrfectPost's advice How to Choose the Best Cat Scratching Post.

The average price to make a scratching post noted above is cost data to compare a contractor’s estimate with doing it yourself. Tweak the data by adding your ZIP Code to find a local cost.

Improvement and Repair Cost Updated 2019