Gross! It smells like cat pee in here

December 1, 2005 8:48 AM

I'm currently considering buying a circa 1900 house that has one major issue, both the first and second floors reek of cat urine. Does anyone have experience with erradicating this odor from an older home?

To further clarify, we're talking about a completely empty house (no furniture or rugs) with hardwood maple floors, that in all likelihood have had a pretty good bath with cat urine. One floor previously had carpet which has been removed. Our current plan is to sand, possibly treat, and poly the hardwood floors professionally. Along with removing all the wallpaper, possibly treating the walls and then painting.

We're contacting as many professionals as we can but it's always good to try for the homeowner POV.

posted by Yukon to home & garden (15 comments total)

Are the floors new? Or are they original, or at least so old that you can't really tell?

Any house that old is probably going to need some renovations. Would you want to just pull the floors up and get new flooring? It would be more expensive than refinishing (possibly a lot more) but you'd also get a much nicer result.

Also, if the walls are plaster, removing wallpaper may be more trouble than it's worth. Sometimes the plaster comes apart more easily then the wallpaper does. You may want to simply drywall over the walls with very thin drywall, remove the plaster and drywall over the lathe or pull the walls down totally and pretend you've got new construction.

Again, this will be expensive, but there is no better time to renovate than before you move into the house. And new walls and floors are pretty simple as renovations go. Plus you could move plugs, fix wiring/lighting problems, etc.

I have a circa 1890 Victorian house and I often wish I could just rip entire rooms apart and start from scratch. I have several neighbours who have done exactly that to their homes. It is, in some ways, easier than trying to patch up what's there.
posted by GuyZero at 9:00 AM on December 1, 2005

This can get quite expensive. If the cats have pissed on the walls which in your house could be plaster and lath you will may have to pull and re-plaster. If the pissed on your wooden floors you may have to pull the floors if resanding does not work.

You can get enzyme liquids that will consume the nasty pee but it takes time and experimentation based on material. Try the sanding in one room and see if it works. because it would be a shame to redo your floors and still have to pull.
posted by jadepearl at 9:07 AM on December 1, 2005

Not sure if cat urine is worse/better than dog urine but the previous owners of my 1907 house basically let their two dogs use the master bedroom as a bathroom. Sanding the floor took care of the smell, stain helped even out the color, and the polyurethane on top sealed it all in. No more smell.

Again, for a cat, ymmv.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 9:18 AM on December 1, 2005

I wouldn't pull up the floors and replace with new materials -- worse has been done to those floors in a hundred years than getting pissed on. Sand and refinish.

Also, are you sure it's actually cat urine and not another ammonia-based odor?
posted by desuetude at 9:21 AM on December 1, 2005

Shellac is an excellent sealer against odors. It also provides a lovely color for old wood. You can also find shellac-based primers for your walls, if you don't end up tearing them out altogether. These folks have had a few discussions on this very topic, just do a search on their messageboards.
posted by killy willy at 9:40 AM on December 1, 2005

I recall seeing a thread about this on alt.home.repair a while ago. I can't find the exact thread, but a quick search on Google groups within alt.home.repair turns up a good number of suggestions.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 10:08 AM on December 1, 2005

Don't take out the wall plaster unless you absolutely have to. (That is, it's falling apart.) Plaster is much nicer than drywall -- it's really soundproof, for one thing. Drywall, as we all know, isn't very soundproof.

In our 1911 house, once we stripped off the wallpaper, the plaster was nearly pristine (except for a couple of earthquake cracks, and a place where the prev. owners had messed with it); we used a shellac primer and then painted, and all was well. Now, we didn't have cat pee on the walls... but even if you do, it would be a crime to throw out wonderful old plaster walls.

We also did a shellac finish on the floor, which most people wouldn't recommend, but it is beautiful.
posted by litlnemo at 10:18 AM on December 1, 2005

(And to clarify, I don't think you should pull up the floors and put in new ones, either. There may be some boards that need to be replaced, but the whole floor?)
posted by litlnemo at 10:19 AM on December 1, 2005

but the whole floor?

In 1900 there were builder who used good materials and builders who used bad materials, much like today. The floor in my home, while quite possibly the original floor made from trees cut before my grandfather was born, is nothing to brag about. It's a mediocre floor, by the standards of any time.

If a cat peed on my floor, I would replace the whole thing in an instant. And I would be unsure whether to hate or thank the cat.

Having never seen Yukon's floor, all I can say that replacing it is a possibility.
posted by GuyZero at 10:48 AM on December 1, 2005

Cat urine can be a big, big problem. I know someone who got a good deal on a house because the previous owners had several cats who apparently never used the litter box. The smell was pretty severe, even after several rounds of professional odor removal and refinishing the floors. She ended up having to pull up all the wood flooring, and found that the urine had soaked through to the sub-floor so she had to replace that as well. As you can imagine, this was ridiculously expensive as well as a huge hassle. Even after all that, you would still get the occasional whiff of cat urine.

I'm guessing the situation in that house was way more extreme than what you're looking at, but personally I'd be very wary of buying that house without having someone who knows about odor removal come in and do a very thorough check of the situation.
posted by nixxon at 10:49 AM on December 1, 2005

A friend of mine recently renovated her circa 1911 home, including sanding the floors. Apparently, her floors had been sanded down before, so that the original nails were getting very close to the surface, which would be damaging to the sanding machinery. Several contractors were hesitant to take the job, but one was able to get, quote "one last sand" out of her floors. So, don't count on being able to sand down; you don't know what's been done to the floors in the last 105 years.
posted by junkbox at 10:59 AM on December 1, 2005

If you can bring a black (UV) light into the house, it should make the cat pee glow in the dark and help you understand just how big the problem is.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 11:50 AM on December 1, 2005

I met with a flooring pro today, he was pretty optomistic about our chances but was gonna get a second opinion from one of his other guys, especially about the smell. He said they'd had success on similar jobs (why do people own cats? these houses must be everywhere!). He did mention replacing or patching the particularly bad sections, but didn't say the floor was lost.

litlnemo, if you have sound advice on removing the wallpaper successfully, I'd be very interested...there's a lot. Walls look like they are in good shape. Email is in profile.

If anyone else has experience, I'm interested to hear more.
posted by Yukon at 2:07 PM on December 1, 2005

This house had quite a bit of cutesy wallpaper which I removed with a wallpaper steamer. A friend then told me she got some kind of liquid in a supermarket that she sponged on which made the wall paper peel right off. Sigh. Both of us were working with wallboard, not plaster, so ymmv.
Btw, if you decide to steam, be careful of the woodwork. The steam can mar the finish.
posted by Cranberry at 12:51 AM on December 2, 2005

I sent Yukon a private message about removing wallpaper, etc. that talked about this stuff a little. But yes, Cranberry, sometimes you can do that with the chemical stuff. In our case the wallpaper had been painted over several times (and oh, the colors. Turquoise was one of them. In the kitchen, too. And on the fireplace. So at one point, apparently they painted the whole damn house turquoise! Can you imagine?). Once the wallpaper has been painted over like that, you're generally looking at a lot of scraping, though steaming and chemicals can help a bit. It's not fun but the results are worth it.
posted by litlnemo at 3:14 PM on December 2, 2005