Since January, Valerie Nadeau has worked to find homes for the homeless cats of Tupper Lake, N.Y. The city has a dog pound but lacks a facility for cats, so Nadeau has kept the cats in her own home. While she has successfully placed 46 cats in new homes, a shelter would help her place even more.
Enter Tom and Sue Lawson. The couple has donated a site for the shelter and is paying to renovate it for the cats, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise reports.
Renovations began in mid-November, with top floor improvements scheduled to be completed in December. Changes to the first floor, where most of the cats will live, are projected to be completed in the spring, Nadeau said.
“It’s going to be a state-of-the-art shelter,” Nadeau told the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. “The cats aren’t going to be in cages; they’ll each have their own cubbyhole.”
Groups of six to eight cubbies will face a common room that contains cat trees and toys. In all, the shelter will feature four to five common rooms, as well as a maternity room for pregnant strays and a quarantine room for sick cats.
“We’ve talked about putting in a medical room,” Nadeau said. “And the whole place is going to have a great ventilation system” to help control litterbox odors.
Future plans for the shelter include boarding services and therapy animals, as well as a store. “Down the road, I would like to expand this to a dog shelter, too,” Nadeau said.