Litterbox location - New Kitten
 

Because of the way our very small house is the litterbox can only go in the (finished) basement.

However, with a very young kitten (9 weeks) I'm sensing it might be a lot to expect him to remember to go all the way back down to the basement if he needs to use it.

So here's the question....

Should we put a second litter box on the second floor for the time being while he adjusts and gains more bladder control?

If we do this is will have to be temporary because its not ideal to have the litterbox in the middle of our living space long term. I want to make sure I'm not teaching him that his bathroom will permanently be in the living room but I also want to manage any potential for accidents in these early weeks.

To clarify, the basement litterbox is set up where it will stay forever already. The one won't change.

Okay, well maybe I [I]do[/I] have some advice for you, after all. An opinion, anyway. :D Yes, I'd give him a box upstairs.

We have one cat. He spends most of his time in the finished basement and only carefully supervised time upstairs (because of one dog who still considers cats untrustworthy :o), but we set up a litter box upstairs for him even though he rarely uses it. It's there if he needs it, and occasionally he does. Because we don't want to encourage the dogs to explore his litter box, we put the upstairs box in an old wire dog crate that's closed when the cat isn't around, but if your dogs aren't inclined to go rootin' for tootsie rolls, you wouldn't need the crate.

Eventually, after he catches on that he should only eliminate in the litter boxes, you should be able to transition the second box downstairs to the basement. The rule of thumb I've always heard is that you should have as many litter boxes as you have cats + 1, so with one cat, you should have 2 boxes. JD has two boxes in his living space downstairs and uses both.

That's what we did, an extra box temporarily. However our kitten was 6 weeks old. By 9 weeks he could manage the half flight of stairs in our house.