I found a package of it at (of all places) Walgreen's when I needed to
rehang a bird feeder after the rope broke.  I'd try a crafts shop like
Michael's or Garden Ridge or something like that for a better deal in a
large quantity.  Or maybe Home Depot or Lowe's.

Jill

Hi Jeff. We usually buy Sisal at Wal-Mart. You can get it at most home
building centers, too. We have tried both the 1/2 and 3/8. My opinion
is, that the 1/2" looks better. But the 3/8" really wraps faster and
takes much less rope. The most tedious task about building a cat tree
is wrapping the sisal. It takes a lot of muscle to get it tight enough.
The best criteria we had for carpet is....whatever was free. It's nice
to use carpet that coordinates with your house carpet. Cheap grade
carpet is much easier to use, because it's thinner and more flexible
for wrapping. But high-grade carpet lasts longer. Berber doesn't work
very well, it snags too easily.

Another thing I wanted to tell you is, if you can't find un-treated
4x4's for posts, just screw together two 2x4's instead of using the
"treated" lumber. Treated lumber has arsenic in it and that just
creeped me out. Also another thing we learned by doing it the WRONG way
is, make sure your base is big enough to stabilize, but not bigger than
you can fit through the door!!
Good luck. My DH is a pretty fair cat-tree-maker. If you have any
questions I'll be glad to share the other mistakes we made!

Sherry

I got mine at Home Depot in Vancouver.  Here in Thailand I got it from
the hardware store next to 7/11, but I doubt that would help you much
;-)
Here's a pic of one of the posts I've built.
http://tinyurl.com/6gt3v
There are 3 more pics after that of the post too.
--
Britta
"There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast." -- Unknown
Check out pictures of Vino at:
http://photos.yahoo.com/badwilson click on the Vino album

Just about anyhardware store :-)

Ginger-lyn

Home Pages:
 http://www.spiritrealm.com/summer/
 http://www.angelfire.com/folk/glsummer (homepage & cats)
 http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~summer/index.htm (genealogy)
 http://www.i-love-cats.com/meow/glsummer/ (The Violence Against
                        Animals in Movies Website)

We bought ours at LOWES, and have seen it at Home Depot as well.  I
suspect any hardware store would have sisal.

Pam S. who needs to buy more to use in the cat jail.