Our Story

We are incredibly proud to own and run Birches Cattery and still often pinch ourselves to check it’s real. Since we were first married in 1983, we talked about how lovely it would be to look after cats for a living, but never believed our dream would ever come to fruition, so we just got on with our regular jobs and life carried on around us.

Then one evening in 2006, we were chatting in front of the TV. We had recently bought what we thought was our ultimate dream house – 3 stories, 5 bedrooms and more bathrooms than you could shake a stick at, but it just didn’t feel like home. We Googled ‘catteries for sale’ and up popped a private advert, showing a property at 12 Gipsy Lane, Irchester. Excited, we phoned up straight away and arranged to visit the next day. As soon as we first laid eye on the place, we knew it was going to be right for us to realise our dream.

Yes it needed work (a very significant amount of work), but we looked past all the issues and problems and were able to see a vision of how we wanted the place to look and how we wanted it to develop and run. Very quickly, we made an offer that was accepted and set about moving in. It soon became apparent that actually ‘our vision’ had been viewed through rose tinted spectacles, as we uncovered a plethora of problems and began to appreciate the amount of time and work it would take to get the place habitable and pleasant to live in and board cats. Alan had given up his well paid job as a manager at a company in Northampton, so we were living on Sue’s teacher’s wage, which covered our important expenses and enabled us to eat!

He started up a small company, A S Home Garden Services, doing a range of jobs from decorating, fencing and home maintenance, as well as buying and selling a wide range of merchandise at car boot sales and markets at the weekends, so we could finance the works needed to set up the cattery. Every time a job was started, be it in the house, garden or cattery, it soon became a major project in it’s own right. The main cattery building in the garden was there, but as it had been used as a breeding cattery it was, let’s say, rather pungent. No actually, the whole place stank! Alan had to basically strip out everything and refurbish the whole cattery, after it had been aired for 6 months. We visited Wood Green Animal Shelter to get ideas for the design of the chalets, as he had a blank canvas to work with, given all that was usable was the shell of the cattery building. Alan affixed PVC cladding to the whole of the inside of the cattery building, making 11 individual chalets, with alternate double and single height pens. He put cat flaps in so the cats would be able to access their outside area as they pleased. The floor was strengthened and doors were fixed. Every pen was equipped with scratching posts, beds, bowls, toys and other cat friendly items. The outsides were fitted with observation shelves and ladders, along with scratching posts and hooded litter trays. We opened on 1 st August 2007, 10 months after we moved in, with just 6 pens ready. We had no client base and no former customers to rely on. It was a gamble. Would anyone come to us? Would they like the cattery? Would we actually develop a sustained clientele? Work was still very much in progress for many more months (years, in fact). Early customers may remember coming through to the back garden and seeing the contents of the bathroom where the summer house now stands, when Alan tackled replacing the suite! People always comment on our garden, which really is beautiful – even if we say so ourselves! It has been transformed from the overgrown wilderness that it was when we moved in. The bottom half was just gravel – there was no grass whatsoever. There was a really small patio of cracked paving slabs laid on mud. The top half of the garden can only be described as jungle like, vastly overgrown with brambles and hawthorn bushes with an old, smashed up greenhouse in front of the cattery and a massive willow tree dominating what space there was. There were so many enormous trees in various states of ill health that needed to be cut down or tamed. Where the willow was, is now the water feature, which covers the huge old stump which was left. When clearing the behind the old patio, Alan dug out and gained an additional 8 feet of land by removing weeds, bushes and other mess, building the lovely decking area.

Meanwhile, with all this work going on in the garden, at least our increasing number of boarders were kept entertained watching Alan toiling away. Since the early years, work both inside and outside of the house has pretty much been on going. There always seems to be something that needs doing here. We count ourselves very fortunate to now have a thriving and popular business. Alan was able to give up his home garden business after a couple of years and finished doing the markets a year or two later in order to devote all his time to running the cattery. It’s been quite a journey, but we wouldn’t change it for the world. It is a real privilege to look after so many lovely cats and we have met some lovely people along the way too, who we now call friends.

So thank you for your continued support. We look forward to seeing you soon.

Alan & Sue