Flapjack Runs the Cat Cottage

Flapjack is a three legged cat. PAWS Atlanta calls him the Cat Cottage Manager, which is the sort of title you give an animal who has decided a building belongs to him. By the late summer of 2025, the building he managed was falling apart.

A 1950s building with a 2025 problem

PAWS Atlanta has been a no-kill shelter since 1966. It started with a group of ordinary animal lovers who were upset about how many animals were being euthanized in animal control, and who ran bake sales, car washes and yard sales until there was a shelter. It sits on Covington Highway in Decatur and cares for around 200 animals at a time.

The Cat Cottage is housed in a structure built in the early 1950s. The cabinetry had taken on water. The flooring had deteriorated to the point where it was close to caving in. Flooding and storm damage kept making the problem worse faster than anyone could get ahead of it.

The blue PAWS Atlanta Cat Cottage building with ladders and materials out front during the renovation. — The Cat Cottage mid project. The building dates to the early 1950s.

A shelter does not have a line item for this. Money that comes in goes to food, medical care and getting animals into homes. A floor is the kind of expense that gets quietly deferred until the floor sets the timeline for you.

Who showed up

PAWS took the problem to Lifecycle Building Center, the Atlanta nonprofit on Murphy Avenue that pulls usable building material out of the waste stream and gets it back into the community. LBC runs a Nonprofit Material MATCH program for exactly this kind of situation.

LBC donated the materials: two large standing cabinet sets and several hundred square feet of plank flooring, an in-kind retail value of about $4,500. NARI Atlanta and Alair Homes are the ones who got everybody in the same room.

Volunteers working inside the PAWS Atlanta Cat Cottage during demolition, with the old wall covering and subfloor exposed. — Volunteers on demolition day, October 21. Rocco from Oneida Builders is on the right.

Our part was the unglamorous half of it. Before anything new goes into a room, everything ruined has to come out of it. We brought the bins and hauled out the demo, including the roof tear off, under the NARI Cares account.

A green Bin There Dump That dumpster parked outside the PAWS Atlanta Cat Cottage while volunteers work behind it. — Our half of the job. Everything ruined had to leave before anything new could go in.

That is the whole contribution and we are not going to dress it up. Nobody writes a newsletter about the dumpster. But a volunteer crew with a day to give and nowhere to put the old flooring gets about an hour of work done before the job stops.

The part that is easy to miss

Set the cats aside for a second and look at the mechanics.

A shelter had a building problem it could not pay for. A materials nonprofit had cabinets and flooring sitting in a warehouse that came out of somebody else’s remodel. A trade association knew both of them by name. A builder and a dumpster company had crews and trucks.

Almost none of it was a donation in the write-a-check sense. It was four organizations each handing over the thing they already had more of than they needed. That is a repeatable model, and it is the reason this one got finished instead of sitting on a list.

Flapjack is back on duty

The cottage has new flooring and new cabinets. The cats have a dry place to live. Flapjack has his building back and, by all accounts, has resumed managing it.

New white cabinets and a wood counter installed along the wall of the PAWS Atlanta Cat Cottage, with new flooring down. — The finished wall. New cabinets from Lifecycle Building Center, new flooring down.

Party for the Paws

The Cat Cottage was a one-time project. The other thing we do for PAWS runs every year.

Party for the Paws is their annual fundraiser, and we put a bin into the silent auction. It goes in as a seven day, 15 yard rental, and somebody walks away with a cleanout they were putting off anyway. We also send bins out whenever PAWS has work of its own at the shelter.

If you are an Atlanta nonprofit with a building problem and a demo pile, that is a call worth making. Ours is 404-692-2838, and you can see the rest of what we support on our community page.