Holy Cats!

[LazySOB]

I considered buying a similar house, except that the wood had rotted, so I would have had to replace flooring.

I figure 20 cats would generate about a half gallon of urine per day… that would tend to saturate any flooring they occupied within a few weeks. The wood flooring may have gotten to where it was continually moist.

2 problems: 1) de-odorizing the areas the cats occupied, and 2) the rest of the house.

Here’s what I think would work:

For #1, you’ll probably need to saturate the wood and concrete. with either the enzyme cleaner you suggest, or some sort of oxidizer. The cheapest oxidizer is sodium hypochlorite (chlorox). Too concentrated for too long, and it’ll break down the structure of the flooring itself, so I’d dilute it at least 5:1 and really saturate things for days. Coat the underside of the wood floor too, if you can get at it. Plan to re-seal the floors (varnish for the wood, maybe epoxy paint for the concrete, after things are very dry.

For #2, an industrial ozone generator will do a passing job. You can rent them, but not all rental houses carry them. The good ones are strong enuf that you need to stay out of the house while it’s running, other than the few seconds to exit and then later to enter the house to open windows. Also will get rid of tobacco smoke odors.

I saw one house that was so bad, they couldn’t even hire professional cleaners to work on it. Tough to imagine.

A good friend was successful with chlorox on concrete, with fresh paint to cover it up. High chance of success there. The difficulty will be whether you can really saturate the wood, with enough good stuff to really overwhelm 100’s of gallons of dried cat urine. A big challenge.

If anyone has more info on what they’ve seen work, please let us know.