Mysterious Smell .....is this possible?

March 29, 2019 6:50 AM

I have a bench that has been exclusively inside --away from any pets--- for over 8 months. It is just now strongly smelling of cat pee.

This bench was outside for a short period of time, maybe a month, but at the time it wasn't around cats who pee on things. It may possibly have been peed on by dog during that time, but towards the end of last summer it was cleaned, sanded, and painted. At no point in this process did it smell like pee.

Suddenly, in its new location it is starting to smell, a lot. I have sprayed it with enzyme cleaner, but I'm a little at a loss. I suppose I could just pitch it, but it is killing me a bit that this homemade furniture, specially painted, and then transferred to an entirely indoor location, completely stinks.

Any hope for this bench? Why does it suddenly smell? There are no pets in this location.

posted by aetg to Education (8 answers total)

What was it cleaned with? Cat pee smells of ammonia.
posted by wellred at 6:58 AM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

Some paints (usually low VOC wall paint, but possibly other kinds I'm less familiar with) contain ammonia which can become prominent as the weather warms.
posted by notquitemaryann at 6:59 AM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

If it helps I had a mystery like this nearly ten years ago. I discovered during the next humid week that summer that a floor mat I'd been using had been peed on by a cat at my old apartment, I regularly washed it, but if it was humid enough, the smell just permeated the apartment in this sort of faint but ubiquitous sort of way. Has it been unusually warm or humid where you are lately? It may just be that it was peed on when it was outside, and the cleaning, sanding and painting you'd done did the bulk of the work of getting rid of the smell, but if the environmental conditions are right, the smell is coming back.
posted by pazazygeek at 6:59 AM on March 29, 2019

The awful Hobo Pee smell in our air conditioning ducts last summer turned out to be mold.

We didn't know how moisture got up there, but a technician from the A/C company pulled off the end of the duct and recoiled.

So maybe it absorbed moisture and some environmental mold, which redoing the surface and then warming up allowed to flourish again?
posted by wenestvedt at 7:12 AM on March 29, 2019

What kind of wood is it made of? I've noted that sometimes juniper or some types of cypress(?) can actually smell kind of like cat pee when the air conditions are just right...
posted by aecorwin at 9:08 AM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

Maybe a cat slipped in and hit it. We have the never ending piss wars in my neighborhood. The house next door was vacant for years with a crawlspace window open, there, I was told, were some fifty or so feral cats about. People moved in and fixed everything, and the numbers of feral cats has decreased. Once territorial marking sets up then it persists. At one time my back security screen was regularly marked. .my neighbor's cat marked in my back hall the other day when I stepped out side.
posted by Oyéah at 9:08 AM on March 29, 2019

Seconding thoughts about the humidity/temperature. There haven't been cats in our house in a few years since we moved in, and it didn't smell then. But some random days when the conditions are just right, the basement reeks of cat. This is confirmed by a friend who actually lived in our basement for a year, who agreed that 99% of the time it was fine, but on those random, usually more humid occasions, it just smelled like cat for a day.
posted by thejanna at 9:17 AM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

Zinsser makes an odour killing primer that's amazing. We used it on kitchen cabinets that had been in a house fire. There was no physical damage, but they reeked of smoke. The primer worked. There was no whiff of smoke afterwards, under any environmental/atmospheric conditions. So if all else fails, you could hit it with that and then repaint.
posted by kate4914 at 10:45 AM on March 29, 2019 [5 favorites]