Feandrea Litter Box Enclosure Review: Months in a Laundry Room

The litter box sat in my laundry room for six years, and for six years I told myself it was fine. It was not fine. Every trip past it with a basket of towels meant grit under my slippers and a smell that had settled into the grout. Then one Sunday my granddaughter walked through that room in bare feet, and I decided I was finished looking at it. About a year ago I bought the Feandrea litter box enclosure, the end table version that measures 31.5 by 20.9 by 19.7 inches, and it has not moved since.

I am 66, retired, and I have spent most of my adult life remodeling a 1970s ranch house room by room with my late husband. I notice particleboard the way other people notice a crooked light switch. So this is not a review assembled from a product page. It is what a year, two cats, and one lamp that never got knocked over have taught me.

How I've Used It

It stands in my laundry room, up against the wall beside the dryer, exactly where the old open pan used to sit. The top is flat and has held a small lamp, a basket of litter bags, and a scoop since the week I assembled it. That is the whole reason I chose an end table over a hooded box. It gave me back a surface I had been missing.

I set it against the wall beside the dryer with about a foot of space on the door side, and that foot matters. The doors swing out and I stand in that gap with the scoop. When I first put it down, I had it tight to the dryer to save room, and I lasted one day before I moved it out. About ten inches of clearance is what I settled on.

Moose is my four-year-old orange male, sixteen pounds and built like a sack of flour. He was the one I worried about. He is a climber and a hard scratcher, and anything flimsy in this house fails inside a month. He went into the Feandrea enclosure the first evening without any coaxing and has used it ever since. Pepper is nine, gray, about eleven pounds, and stiff in the hips these days. She is the cat I expected to object. She uses it too, and I think the privacy suits her more than the open pan ever did.

Day to day it is simple. I open the front doors, scoop into a bag, wipe the bottom, close the doors. I do not lift a lid. I do not move furniture. The pan itself is one I already owned, because the enclosure does not come with a litter box. That surprised me when the carton arrived, so consider this your warning: you are buying the cabinet, an accessory kit, and the instructions. The pan is yours to supply.

What the Feandrea Enclosure Is, and What It Is Not

It is a piece of furniture built from particleboard and MDF with a rustic finish and barn doors across the front. Overall it measures 31.5 inches long, 20.9 inches wide, and 19.7 inches tall, and it weighs around 35 pounds. The listing puts the maximum weight capacity at 66 pounds. The compartment inside is 19.8 by 19.8 by 18.3 inches, which is the number that matters most and the one I nearly ignored.

Measure your litter box before you order. Nineteen and eight tenths of an inch in either direction is not generous. My pan fit with room to spare, but a jumbo high-sided box will not, and no amount of rearranging fixes that. Measure the pan, then measure the swing of the doors in your actual room, because those doors need clearance to open and you will be opening them every day.

It is not a litter box. It is not an odor filter. It does not do anything mechanical. There is no fan, no vent, no cartridge, no drawer that slides out, nothing that runs. What you get is an enclosed room for the pan and a flat top you can set things on. Feandrea also lists a two-year warranty, which is longer than I expected on furniture of this kind and one reason I stopped comparing and ordered.

Assembly Was One Coffee's Worth of Work

The listing says twenty minutes. I will say twenty-five, because I am sixty-six and I read instructions twice. The parts came labeled and the hardware came in the accessory kit, and I put it together on the laundry room floor with a screwdriver and no help at all. Nothing was missing. Nothing needed to be re-drilled. The step-by-step sheet was actually in order, which I have learned not to assume.

I put it together on a Tuesday evening in October with the radio on and a cup of coffee going cold on the dryer. The carton was heavy, so I laid the pieces out on the floor one at a time instead of dumping them. Labeled parts, a bag of hardware, and the sheet. I stopped once to re-read a step where two panels looked alike, and that was the only slowdown of the night.

Two notes from doing it. Build it where it will live, or close to it, because thirty-five pounds of assembled cabinet is awkward to carry through a doorway by yourself. And tighten everything at the end rather than as you go. I snugged the frame first and then went around again, and it came out square with no wobble on the tile.

A year on, it is still square. I have not had to re-tighten a single fitting, which is more than I can say for the cat tree I own. The doors still sit level in the frame, and nothing has loosened at the hinges with daily opening and closing.

A Year of Two Cats: Scatter, Smell, and the Lamp on Top

Here is the honest accounting. The scatter dropped noticeably. It did not stop. Moose still kicks granules out through the opening when he is in a hurry, and I still find a few on the tile on Saturday mornings. But the daily sweep is gone, and the drift of litter that used to reach the hallway is finished. That alone was worth the change for me.

Smell is a different subject, and I will not oversell it. Enclosing a litter box does not clean it. I scoop once a day and change the litter on a schedule, and that is what keeps my laundry room livable. What the cabinet does is contain the sight of the pan and most of the mess around it. If you are expecting the enclosure to fix odor by itself, you will be disappointed, and that is not the furniture's fault.

One morning in February the washer hose let go overnight and I came into standing water on the tile. I carried the pan out, wiped the cabinet down, and set it up on two bricks for three days while the floor dried out. The finish came through with no swelling at the bottom edge, which I did not expect from particleboard in a wet room.

The top has been the surprise. A lamp, a basket of supplies, and my reading glasses at night. It reads as an end table in the corner of a laundry room, which sounds like a small thing until you remember what stood there before. The barn door front blends into the rest of my house better than a plastic hood ever did, and I have had two of those over the years.

Both cats adjusted faster than I did. Moose took to it in an evening. Pepper circled it for three days, then went in and stayed in for a while. I did not have to teach either of them anything, and I did not have to move the box back out to the open floor as a compromise.

Where It Falls Short

The doors. Pepper pushes through them fine, but a cat who has never used a door or a flap may refuse, and there is no way to know until you try. If your cat is timid, prop the doors open for the first week and see how it goes. Some cats simply will not, and then you own a very nice end table.

The inside is dark and low. The compartment is 19.8 inches deep, so scooping is a forward bend and a reach, and with a shoulder that has seen better days I feel it by the end of the week. I keep a small penlight in the basket and use it every evening, and I slide the pan as close to the opening as it will go. And this is particleboard, while my laundry room is the dampest room in the house. I keep a folded towel underneath it and wipe up spills right away. A year in, the finish has held, but I would not set it directly on a wet floor and expect it to shrug that off.

The size ceiling is real and it is the thing most likely to send this back. The compartment is 19.8 inches square and 18.3 inches tall. A big cat is fine. Moose is sixteen pounds and turns around in there without complaint. A big box is not fine. Neither is a covered pan with a tall dome.

Last, it is furniture, not a portable item. Thirty-five pounds with a lamp on top means you are not sliding it across the floor to vacuum behind it on a whim. I pull it out twice a year and that is enough.

What I Compared Before I Bought

I looked at three other approaches first. A hooded plastic box was the easy answer, and I have owned two of them. They trap the smell inside a sealed dome, the plastic discolors, and the lid cracks at the hinge within a couple of years. I did not want a third. The last one is still in my garage, cracked at the hinge, waiting for the spring cleanup.

A wooden cabinet with a drawer and a shelf looked handsome online and had a run of reviews mentioning a warped drawer. A top-entry box solved the scatter but not the sight of the pan, and Pepper with her stiff hips would have had to jump in and out several times a day. The Feandrea end table version won because it does the one job and gives me a flat surface back. I read through the reviews on it before ordering, though I take those with a grain of salt, the same as I would take mine.

The scatter went from a daily sweep to a Saturday morning sweep, and the lamp on top has not moved once in a year.

Who This Is For

This is for the person whose litter box sits in a room other people walk through, or in a bathroom or laundry room where the sight of it has worn thin. It suits a household with one or two cats of average size using a standard pan, and it suits anyone who wants that corner to hold something useful instead of something you apologize for.

It also suits a household with an older cat, as long as that cat can step over a low entry and push a door. Pepper is nine and stiff in the hips, and she manages without any accommodation from me. But if your cat is very elderly or unsteady on its feet, watch the first week closely and be ready to prop the doors.

And it suits someone who wants to buy once. I have replaced enough plastic hoods to know that the cheap answer is not always the cheap answer over five years.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you have a jumbo pan, a high-sided pan, or a self-cleaning box. The compartment is 19.8 inches square and 18.3 inches tall, and none of those fit inside it. Skip it if your cat refuses doors, because a cabinet with the doors permanently propped open is just a cabinet with a litter box in it.

And skip it if what you actually want is odor control. Buy a pan you can clean easily and scoop twice a day, or look at how you feed. This is furniture that contains a mess. It is not a machine, and nothing about it will scrub the air in your laundry room.