DIY cat enclosure: a costed build against kit prices

Most guides to building a catio skip the part that decides it, which is what the materials actually cost in Australia against a finished kit of the same size. We have priced the mesh from Bunnings' own listings and set it beside 54 enclosures costed per square metre of floor. The honest conclusion is that a lot of people who do this arithmetic properly end up buying a kit.

Mesh and kit prices checked 12 September 2026

The mesh mistake almost every build starts with

Chicken wire is the default mental image of a home-built run, and it is the wrong product. The heavy duty chicken wire netting in our Bunnings records is a 50mm hexagonal aperture at 1.4 mm wire. That gauge is the heaviest Bunnings publishes, and it does not matter: a 50mm hole is a 50mm hole, a kitten goes straight through it, and Bunnings' own stated uses for the roll are poultry yards, chicken coops, plant protection and garden trellising. No cat use is claimed anywhere on the page.

The tightest aperture we found at Bunnings is a 12 x 12mm aviary mesh, sold for finches, budgerigars and canaries. It is tighter than every finished enclosure in our dataset bar one. It is also, per square metre of roll, the cheaper of the two.

Roll area is ours, computed from each roll's published width and length. Bunnings publishes no wire gauge for the aviary mesh and no price at all for the widest chicken wire roll on the day we checked, so both are recorded as not published rather than guessed. Bunnings quotes delivery only after a postcode, so none of these figures include freight.

For what Bunnings stocks as a finished unit rather than as raw material, including the walk-in timber catios sold through its Marketplace by third parties, see Bunnings cat enclosures.

What the mesh alone costs

A meshed box is four walls and a roof. That skin is three to five times the floor area, which is the step most DIY budgets miss: a 12.96 square metre run needs roughly 38.9 square metres of mesh. Below, four real enclosures from our price register are treated as if you built a plain rectangular box of the same footprint and height yourself, meshed on all four sides and the roof, using the 12 x 12mm aviary mesh at $33.20 a roll.

Assumptions, stated so you can argue with them: a plain rectangle, walls plus roof, floor left open to the ground, no door opening deducted, no overlap or offcut waste added, mesh rolls rounded up to whole rolls. Every one of those assumptions is generous to the DIY side. Width, depth and height are the seller's published dimensions; floor area and skin area are ours, computed from them.

The number that decides it

Take the cheapest enclosure per square metre in our whole register, the Catnets Quad 3.6m x 3.6m Portable Cat Enclosure at $1,120 for 12.96 square metres, which works out at $86 per square metre of floor. Mesh for a home-built box of the same dimensions comes to $299, or about 27% of what the finished unit sells for.

That leaves roughly $821 to cover the frame timber, the fixings, a weatherproof roof, hinges, a latch, a door, ground anchoring and the two or three weekends it takes. We do not publish a timber figure, because we have not sourced treated pine and hardware pricing into this dataset and inventing one would undo the point of the page. What we can tell you is the size of the envelope it has to fit inside, and it is not generous.

At the other end it looks different. The dearest unit per square metre here is the Somerzby Tower Portable Cat House at $562 per square metre, and the median across all 54 costed units is $269. Against those, materials leave real headroom. The catch is that the expensive units per square metre are the small ones, and a small box needs the same door, the same hinges, the same roof detail and nearly the same number of cuts as a large one. The labour does not shrink with the footprint. That is the whole reason kits win.

When building is still the right call

• Attached to the house. No kit in our data is designed to seal against a wall, a window or a cat door. If you want the cat to come and go from inside without a human opening anything, you are either building it or buying a tunnel kit and adapting.
• Odd shapes and narrow side passages. Kits are rectangles. A 900mm gap down the side of a house, an L around a corner, or a run along a fence line is a shape nothing is sold in.
• Large footprints. Materials scale with area but the door, the latch and the fiddly corners do not. If you want 20 or 30 square metres, DIY is the only route that does not mean buying three kits and joining them.
• You already own the timber. Obvious, but it is the single most common reason a DIY build actually comes in cheaper. Most of the builds that beat a kit on price started with a pile of decking offcuts or a dismantled fence.

Three specifications nobody can give you

A DIY build is often criticised for being unengineered. It is worth knowing how little the commercial alternative publishes.

1. Wind. Nobody publishes a rating. 0 of 68. Not one seller references AS/NZS 1170.2, names a wind region, or states a wind speed. The closest anything comes is an instruction to peg it down. So a flat-pack sold to Cairns and the same flat-pack sold to suburban Melbourne carry the identical silence, and no product here can be ranked above another on wind performance.
2. Mesh aperture. 24 of 58 finished units publish one. Wire gauge is worse at 20 of 58. If you build it yourself you at least know the aperture, because it is printed on the roll you bought.
3. Floor area. Zero sellers publish it. Every square metre figure on this site, including the ones above, was computed by us from published width and depth. That is our number, not the seller's, and each record notes which dimension pair it came from.

Before you cut anything

Two checks, in this order. First, whether you need containment at all, which is a council question and the answer is genuinely mixed across Australia: the council register has the instrument for each one. Second, whether the structure you are about to build needs an approval of its own, which is a different part of the same council and turns on floor area, height and how close to the boundary it sits. That is covered in building approval. A freestanding mesh box in the middle of a yard is a different proposition from a roofed timber room bolted to the house, and councils treat them differently.

If the arithmetic above has talked you out of building, the full costed comparison is in price per square metre, and the materials each brand actually uses are in the materials register.

Fitting out what you build

The shell is half the job. A cat uses vertical space far more than floor, so shelves, ramps and a high perch change how much a given footprint is worth more than another square metre of ground would. Shade matters more than most builders expect in an Australian summer.

Common questions

Is it cheaper to build a cat enclosure than to buy one?

Less often than people expect. Mesh alone, using the tightest mesh Bunnings sells at $33.20 for 4.5 square metres of roll, costs about $299 for a box the size of the cheapest kit in our data. That kit sells for $1,120. So roughly $821 is left for frame timber, fixings, a roof, hinges, a latch and your own weekends. It can be done, but the margin is thinner than the usual advice suggests, and it gets thinner the more closely you match a cheap large kit.

Will chicken wire hold a cat?

No. The chicken wire Bunnings sells is a 50mm hexagonal aperture, which a kitten goes through and an adult cat can work at. The tightest mesh in the Bunnings records we hold is a 12 x 12mm aviary mesh, and it is also cheaper per square metre of roll: about $7.38 against $9.57 for the heavy duty chicken wire. The wrong mesh is the more expensive one here.

Does new galvanised mesh need treating before a cat uses it?

Bunnings' own product page for the aviary mesh says so: it recommends that new galvanised wire mesh used in aviaries and pet cages be treated to remove excess zinc that could possibly harm pets. That is the retailer's warning on the retailer's page, not ours, and it is worth acting on before a cat is shut in with a few dozen square metres of fresh galvanising.

How strong does a DIY catio need to be in wind?

Nobody can tell you, including the people selling finished enclosures. Not one of the 68 products in our dataset publishes a wind rating of any kind: no AS/NZS 1170.2 reference, no wind region, no wind speed. A flat-pack sold to a buyer in suburban Melbourne and a buyer in Cairns carries the same silence. The one advantage a DIY build has here is that you know exactly what you fixed it to.