with all that carpet to scratch and grass to chew and everything! i bet your cat's delighted 🙌

Awesome. How is that ladder fastened to the wall?

Birbs: “the cat is just watching me menacingly”

I quite like the neighbours colourful homes. Is your a different shade of yellow? Or is it the sun that makes it look more yellow?

Did you also paint the tile(?) pieces at the bottom of the ladder?

edit: ops, I got distracted and forgot to comment on the ladder itself, as I'm also curious on how it is fasted to the wall

I'd say the cat clearly approves it based on the second picture

Why does your apartment/condo have anti-suicide nets? Do you live in a factory in Shenzhen?

I would guess that it is to keep the cat inside.

If that's the case I'm genuinely surprised that the city/HOA isn't complaining.

It's for the cat not the human

These nets would be poorly suited for that purpose. They're for the cat

We don't have HOAs in Europe, and why would the city complain?
Edit:
If anything, the landlord would complain, but I have high hopes they will never discover it. If they do, I made the whole contraption easy for me to remove (no tools needed!).

They exists for apartment complexes with individual owners, but it is not something the typical renter would have much experience with.

With this camouflage-colored set of brackets (is that what you call them in English?)

Tbh I'm kinda proud of how I made the board fit between the upper and the lower window 🙈 although now I can't open the upper one anymore (but I unhinge it during summer)

My own house sadly is a run-down, never-been-repainted shade of grey, but on the plus side, I mostly don't have to look at it.
Am also pretty happy with the renovations done across the street (the whole building used to be a brothel before, now they have apartments with a shower in each bedroom 🤗 and in the ground floor is a halal restaurant 😂). Some pastel shade of yellow is pretty common here, but I don't know if the city has rules for it (if anything the pastel seems to be a rule).
The tiles on the wall are photo prints of street art - the photographer sold them at an arts & crafts fair.

She has phases of using it daily vs completely ignoring it 🙂 But apparently the most recent addition of the mats/carpets made it much more attractive to her (also easier to walk up and down the ladder - the bare wood was a bit too slippery).

Why would they not? I've heard that Europe is extremely strict when it comes to altering the facade of your building; is that no longer the case?

I mean I've literally seen videos of garages in The Netherlands with the door being disguised as a normal wall with a window, to maintain the appearance of the original building. Am I wrong about this?

I guess what I meant mostly when such rules are imposed (your house can only look like this and that from the outside), they would come from a public administration like a city (like in my case) or regional government - not a private org like an HOA. Very probably associations like that exist everywhere in some shape or form, but I figure at least in my country they would have much less power because there tend to be just laws for that.
I meanr it's very unlikely for the city government to complain about my windows because my building isn't owned by them and it really looks very inconspicuous from the outside.
And I can't think of a government department that goes around the city checking for ugly windows and writing them up like parking tickets. There is a construction police, but this is not the kind of thing they are watching for...