Cleaning Up After The Cat

My Father-in-law passed away about six weeks ago. About eighteen months before that, my mother-in-law passed away. It has been a rough road that my wife has been on for the last two years.

The estate trust is still not completely settled yet, but my wife and her brother have come to one conclusion. He does not want the house, and my wife does. So my wife has been going through all of their belongings, sorting, cleaning, and that is no easy task. My mother-in-law was a pack rat. She saved everything, as most people from the depression era, did. You never know when someone will need what you are about to throw out. A little of that has rubbed off on my wife, and needless to say, we have accumulated are own arsenal of goods, that my wife insists has some sort of value, weather monetarily or practically. This is a project that could go on for years. I have tried to be as supportive as I can. My philosophy is, if you haven’t used it in the last year, throw it away or give it to someone who can make good use out of it. But that’s another whole blog post.

Bob and Janice, ( my father-in-law and mother-in-law ), have a cat. Boots was twenty years old. He was losing his eye sight. He was losing his hearing. He was struggling to walk. His one leg was so bad that he didn’t even sit down all the way on it, and he had a kidney infection also. He was hurting.

We talked to the veterinarian that they used and he said that he talked to Bob about putting Boots down awhile ago, but to Bob, that was Janice’s’ cat, and he was not going to put him away for nothing. He would keep him alive as long as he could, no matter what the cost.

Boots was treated like royalty. He was given distilled water, and he always had a hearty appetite. Special pillows and blankets that belonged just for his use were placed where he liked them. When ever he wanted to take a nap on the bed or the couch, he would stand by it till someone would come rushing over to lift him up on it, and then they have to cover him with his blankets and put his pillows in place.

Because of Boots age or kidneys or a combination of both, he would sometimes go and relieve himself in the corners of a couple of the rooms. Needless to say, ooooh that smell was awful. I was over there trying to power scrub and clean those corners, but Boots would just go back and do it again and again. No one would ever do anything about it and no one would ever dare make the suggestion that Boots was ready to go to kitty cat heaven.

This is the home that we inherited, and this is the home that we are going to be moving into and paying off in a couple of years with the Money Merge Account program from United First Financial.

I said all that to say this.

The first thing that had to happen, was the carpet had to be removed. All of it, and we even thought about replacing all the sub flooring also. But we learned that this might not be necessary.

We tried to soak the stained sub flooring with a strong, 10 to 1 ratio of bleach and water. Ten parts bleach to one part water. I would suggest a mask to wear over your nose and mouth and lots of ventilation. If the cat smell didn’t kill you, the bleach would. It was very strong. We left it to dry for a couple of days.

It did work to some degree, but there still was a faint smell of urine in the air. We were also told that in the hot muggy days of summer, the smell might return. This was not going to work. Something else had to work.

Next, we got some advice from a builder friend of ours and a friend who buys rental properties. He has come across this problem before, and they both recommended a sealer primer called Kilz. Not the latex brand, but the oil based one. We applied this to all of the rooms, and we put on a very heavy two coats.

Again, I suggest a mask and lots of ventilation, as the Kilz has a very strong oder itself. Also you want to use a heavy nap roller so that you can get into all the cracks and crevasses with the sealer.

A couple of days drying and the smell was gone. We were amazed. We invited lots of friends in to test their noses…. and no smell.

We continued are remodeling with some fresh paint on the walls and some rooms got the ceiling done as well. The carpet was laid and we don’t have any smell. No hint that a cat was even there at all. Nothing but new paint and carpet.

The real test will come when we bring our cat over to the new home. He is about five years old and has never been anywhere but in out house. He has never seen another cat. He is a male, and I know that they are very territorial. We hope that the smell of Boots will not be present, but we know that he is going to smell him in that house somewhere.  Boots lived there for all of the  twenty years of his life. We aren’t going to be able to get rid of all of his presence. We just hope that our cat won’t care and just go back to doing what he does best. That’s sleeping.