My dad is a carpenter and while working in a house he saw a cat tree he liked. He made a comment to the home owner about how much he liked it and she said he could take it. It's a nice tree and was probably quite expensive when it was purchased but you can tell the woman's cats really liked it, they put a good deal of wear on it. It has mainly wood posts with bark on them and one post that is sisal. The sisal is scratched to bits and starting to fall off. One of the wooden posts is missing a large chunk of the bark. I'd like to try and fix it up so it looks nice, my cats don't scratch wood or sisal unfortunately. I was looking for some advice on fixing it. I'm thinking I'll just replace the sisal (I could do carpet which they would actually scratch but I've heard it's much harder to attach). I just spent an hour taking all the sisal off so have a decent idea of how to go about attaching it. What I want an opinion on is the bark. Do you think I should just leave it as is with the chunk missing or should I peel the bark off the whole post and sand it a bit, leaving behind a plain wood post? Or peel it off and cover it with sisal as well? (though it doesn't have flat, straight sides like the sisal covered post so not sure if that complicates things).
