Journal News Editor Michelle Miller-Carl and her husband purchased their first home in February 2008. Her blog follows her adventures in new homeownership.

My cat Lucy is amazing. She’s an epicuriean with bananas, tuna, chicken, grapes and baby spinach among her favorite foods. She’ll let you hold her like a baby. She can catch a fly out of mid-air. And just this weekend, she displayed her amazing ability to scale a door frame like a bear shimmying up a tree.

She’s done this before, but not in our new house.

The problem with this amazing feat is that she leaves her claw marks in the door molding. When we lived in our first apartment, she clawed her way up the door jamb so many times, it looked like a velociraptor lived with us (amazingly, we got our full deposit back from our landlord).

Now that she’s started this behavior again, I’m reminded of a trick my husband read about that solved the problem before.

Apparently, cats hate stickiness. So I conjectured that my cat wouldn’t like it if I put loops of masking tape on the door jamb. Sure enough, the first time she tried to jump up, she brought down one of the loops with her and completely freaked out. She never jumped up there again.

So if there are areas your cat claws, try putting some masking tape there as a training mechanism. It’s more humane than declawing the cat and it’ll save your furniture, carpet, door jambs, etc.