The Duchess' Bird Watching Perch

After seeing this post on design sponge,  this post on cut out and keep, and yet another on Threadbanger, I was inspired to make one of these for the cats.

Ever since the spring started, the birds have returned to our area and our cats couldn't be happier. It's like Kitty Cable out the windows of our house.

The only problem is that our front doors are a solid panel of aluminum a thrid of the way up, and our cats are not, so they've been finding creative ways to look out the window, including sitting on my laptop and pressing every key and messing it up a bit.
When I came home from my parents at Christmas, I had more than I came with and used an old suicase they wanted to be rid of to carry my gifts home. i of course had immediate repurpose for this case the second I touched it.

Using all the instructions from the post on design sponge, I whipped this together in less than 10 minutes. The  hardware ended up costing me around $9 with taxes (bought the exact same ones in her post from Home Depot). The legs came from a table I liberated from the Salvation Army Thrift Shop for a mere $3 (the top of the table has been epoxied to a lazy susan to make a sculpture stand, much like the image below, minus the legs/stand so that I can access all side of my paper mahce sculptures when forming or painting.). 

The funniest part is that it took longer to clean the suitcase than it did to actually finish the mounting of the hardware and putting the legs in. We now have a space to store all the toys and other cat things off the coffee table with the interior pockets and under the pillow-blanket thing.

To keep the lid from closing down on them, there is a piece of hollow aluminum tube (formerly part of an aluminum arrow shaft) on the interior edge of the hinges. I'm looking at a hook and catch system instead (the kind of bent nail and eye hook idea) but I can't seem to find one in brass to match the suitcase hardware.

Additionally, a proper pillow would be a great improvement. I searched through my fabirc stash tring to find something with an appropriate colour or weight, but found nothing. I'm sure I'll find a t-shirt the right colour and just stitch that up and fill it with some cotton batting I have.