You will learn to spot the routes your cat actually uses, why certain spots create tension, and how to rearrange things without buying anything.
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A cat does not occupy a home the way we do. It has lines, blind corners and bottlenecks, and most space problems can be read there.
Watch it go from the door to its bowl. The odds are it follows the wall, passes behind the armchair and cuts across at the last moment, rather than taking the rug diagonally.
Edges give cover on one side and a constant reference point. That is why a piece of furniture pushed against a wall can delete a whole route while you feel you have changed nothing at all.
A narrow hallway, a cat flap, a back door, a staircase: wherever the way through comes down to a single line, two cats cannot pass without meeting, and a cat on its own can be caught out there.
It is not the square metres that count, it is the number of ways of getting from one point to another. A flat with two routes to the food bowl produces less friction than a bigger one that offers only one.
The tray goes where it gets in the way least: the far end of the bathroom, a cupboard, the back of a utility room. Those are precisely the places you cannot leave except the way you came in.
For a cat that feels watched, that alone is enough to produce accidents elsewhere in the house. Just check that it can see the opening from the tray, and that nothing closes behind it: a swinging door, a machine starting up, another animal settling in the doorway.
A door you shut in the evening can cut off the water, the litter tray or the one quiet place in the home. The cat has no way of telling you other than by scratching at three in the morning.
Before shutting a room at night, take stock of what stays on the other side. Often it is enough to duplicate one resource, a second water bowl for instance, for the door to stop being a problem.
Sealed wood, smooth tiles, laminate: the landing zone counts as much as the take-off point. A cat that skids once coming down off a unit often avoids that route afterwards, and you assume it has simply changed its mind.
A rug at the exact spot where it lands solves that for almost nothing. It matters all the more for an older cat, for which a bad landing costs more than a detour.
Along the lines it uses every day, a cat meets whatever is there: the handles of fabric bags, blind cords, hair ties, sewing thread, the string off a joint of meat. Fine threads are the worst of it, because once started they are not easily spat out again.
Rather than tidying the whole house, tidy the line. Its routes cover a small part of your floor area, and that is where the sorting pays.
The method costs nothing: for a few days, note where it goes, where it stops, where it turns round. Two or three main lines will appear, along with stations, often where two rooms meet.
Only then rearrange: the bed on a station, not in the middle of a line; the scratching post on a line, not in a blind corner; the food bowl away from the busiest crossing.
It is the reverse of what we normally do, which is to pick a nice-looking spot first and then be surprised that the cat wants nothing to do with it.