Good morning everyone,
I wanted to know how to remove the cat smell from our house? Our cat now lives with my sister, but his smell is sooo strong. No matter how much I wash everything I can still smell it hours later. The smell is in my son's bookbag, our coats, and mainly the laundry room( that's the only room with carpet). I've tried spraying the areas with vinegar and water( as someone suggested), I've also tried putting down baking soda(as someone suggested). PLEASE HELP!!!
mix 8 oz of peroxide
1 tsp of baking soda
1 drop of liquid soap
soak the effected area throughly...reapeat as needed. Was first used for skunk odor, but works great for any kind of smells. You may have to repeat it several times, until all the odor is gone.
Uh oh. My husband and I used to manage apartments that allowed cats. Whenever anyone who had a cat would move out, we would get prepared for a lot of expense. Sometimes there were no problems but more often than not, we would discover that cat smell. At first we tried all sorts of methods and products and ionizing machines and whatever we could find! In the end, we learned to accept that there is almost no getting rid of that smell! Even when we did, it would later come back to haunt us as the smell would always resume later on one way or another. The only thing that worked was completely replacing the carpet and pad and cleaning and sealing the floor prior to putting anything new onto it. I'm sorry I don't have better news for you but hopefully starting new will save you a lot of time and distress. I believe you will need new coats and book bag too. Sorry! Good luck!
I use a product called Nature's Miracle, which is available at pet supply stores. It's worth every penny. When there's a carpet problem, I pour it on so it soaks through both the carpet and the pad. It has a fragrance of its own that isn't all that pleasant but, when it dries, both its own smell and the cat smell should be gone. If the cat smell is still there, I know I've missed a spot. So I have a little black light that tells me where to aim (a black light is a very good thing to have if you have a cat - especially a male cat).
I'm not saying you might not have to replace the carpet, if Mr. Kitty has done too much damage - but this is well worth trying first.
You can try it on the coats and on the bookbags as well. Can't hurt! I've used it on books and upholstered furniture.
If you have any NM left over, you can give it to your sister. Male cats, bless 'em, are territorial - even when they're fixed, although they're not quite so bad at it then. You want to remind your sister to change his litter box frequently so he always has a clean place to answer the call of Nature and won't look for another location.
P.S. I just read Bobbi's post. I've had her experience! When we moved into this house decades ago, there was a spot we just couldn't keep our cats and dogs away from. When we pulled up the carpeting, we found a spot in the hardwood made by the previous owners' pets. I remember using two applications of full-strength Clorox to get the smell out! Then we covered that place in the dining room with an area rug until we had the floors redone later on.
It sounds like you'll have to take the carpet out. If the urine has soaked into the flooring underneath, you might have to remove that as well. Sometimes you can paint killz over it and it will seal the wood...
Toss the book bag... get a new one.
Wash the coats in your washing machine with a cup of vinegar in the wash. That might work.
YMMV
LBC
Well first thing I would do would be to toss the book bag (and maybe coats) and buy another. Obviously kitty peed on it. Yuk.
I have no great answers otherwise. We had to have all our carpet pulled and we installed hardwood floors. When we did pull the carpet, we found that the cat urine had soaked into the floorboards. So we never would have gotten the smell out without starting over. If you keep pouring things onto the carpeting you're just making the floorboards wet with urine and whatever you're putting on it. Can you rip the carpet out of the laundry room? That's probably where most of the smell is coming from, because it's probably a moist room due to the washing machine being there.
Wash anything that is washable or take it to the dry cleaners. If it won't hurt the coats in the wash you can add a pet enzyme cleaner to the wash too. For the carpet try a pet cleaner that is an enzyme cleaner like nature's miracle. You may need to do it a couple of times and saturate it pretty good since it is now an old smell/stain it sounds like. If you have a carpet cleaner or can borrow one use that too.
There are enzymes sold in liquid form. You pour it into the carpet. Be sure, though, if the cat sprayed the baseboard and wall get that wet as well -- pour it slowly down the wall into the baseboard. It slowly (over hours) turns the urine into not-urine. There are some cheap brands we do not like. One we do like is by "Nature's Miracle." Look for these products in pet stores. They work very well.
Since you had a male cat he may have been spraying things to mark his territory (even if he was neutered), if this is the case you have a lot more work ahead of you than if it was just the smell permeating the area the litter box was in. I have heard good things about Nature's Miracle, so i would try that first on the carpeting and in the wash, and wash everything you possibly can. If that doesn't help, the next step is replacing the carpet - but before you put new in, make sure the smell hasn't seeped into the floor below. If the cat did spray the walls, you can paint with Killz ORIGINAL (the other versions don't fight odors, read the labels) or Zinnser Bin Sealer. Then you can repaint over these. We just bought a house that had terrible pet odors, the problem was, the owner was a chain smoker, so the smoke smell hid the pet smell (maybe that was his intent). We were able to get the smoke smell out fairly quickly, but the cat smell was horrible. We were redoing the floors and when we pulled out the carpet, we discovered it was deep in the hardwood underneath. The smell also seemed to be in the baseboard heaters, and the walls and closet of the master bedroom. We are now cat odor free, but it was a lot of work. Hopefully you have better luck.
SCOEX worked well for us, and odo-ban does too - but not sure if it permanently kills left behind urine crystals like SCOEX does
www.scoe10x.com/Scripts/SCOE10X-Odor-Eliminator.asp ...
Nature's Miracle did not work for getting rid of the male cat spraying smell... tho I'm told it works wonders for dog urine, just didn't get the job done for cat urine.
nature's miracle. you can get it at petco, petsmart, and i'm sure other pet stores.
I had a cat pee (probably several times before I found it because it was soaked, UGH!) on a large wool rug over my wood floor. Well, it was even in the wood pretty good. First I tried Nature's Miracle, a few treatments. I did this to the carpet and the floor itself seperately. Then I did the vinegar and water (mostly vinegar), several treatments. It took a while and I had to treat it again a few weeks later because I thought I smelled a faint odor when I smelled it directly. But I do have a very good nose.
So, you may want to stick with it and keep trying. Also, you may have to pull the carpet up and treat the floor seperately if it has reached down there. I think it helps to air dry. If not, you may just need new carpet.
Good Luck!
Baking soda and lemon. Mix them together and rub that in. Works miracles for me. We used it in our rental apartment where the rpevious owner had 4 doggies and so I cat wanted to mak ethe place her own.
