Outdoor cats

[hummusscot]

We just moved to a new area (ok, about 6 weeks ago now) and cats have been inside to adjust etc. However, a problem has now arisen.

We are in a ground floor flat with a (small and not fenced off) private garden out the front- level to the pavement and quiet street outside. There is also a shared back garden attached to other back courts and a lane. To get to this however you need to go down a flight of stairs and our back windows are too high up for the cats to jump out of and get out for a wander.

So, what do we do? Ideally I would want them to go in the back garden but there's no cat flap and even if there was, there's no cat flap on the close door so installing one would be pointless. The other option is to put them out the front which I'm nervous about, it's a quiet street but I'm worried something would happen.

Would you consider putting a cat flap in the window that leads to the back garden? Would that work?

When we lived on the 2nd floor of a tenement flat, we got the other people in the close to agree to us putting in a cat flap (at our expense) in the door to the back/drying green and put a cat flap in our own door (my brother cut out one of the panels and then reattached it with a two way hinge and some magnets, so the door still looked the same.)

My parents once put a cat flap into a window and created a couple of (well treated) wooden "shelves" on the outside for them to access the window. The only other "ground floor" access on that side of the house was the sliding patio doors, so there was no way they were going to cut a hole in them

I’m not in a flat but have a cat flap in a window. We’ve made a shelf on the other side. Cat loves it- would this be an option.