We have had a few instances of having to deal with pet odors. I finally came up with the holy grail of killing pet odors from flooring. I’ll warn you, it’s not easy, but it is a permanent fix and it prevents animals from continually marking their territory after you’ve cleaned it.
Both places we’ve lived recently, the previous owners had pet stains in the carpets. This caused our old cat (RIP little buddy) to mark his territory in the corners of the walls. In our last house, this was mostly upstairs. Cat urine is one of the worst things to try to get rid of because when the urine dries it leaves behind crystals of uric acid. When these crystals are dry, you won’t smell anything, but they will stink when they get wet. This is why you can clean up a pet accident, but the animal might continue to mark that same spot. They can still smell the uric acid. These crystals won’t easily be dissolved in water and detergent like other parts of pet urine so they are incredibly tough to remove. There are two ways to remove the smell. One is to seal it in, and the other is to use enzymes to break the crystals down completely.
In our upstairs in both our old home and our current home, the previous owners’ pet stains caused our cat to stake his claim in the same places. After a while, even after cleaning it with a carpet shampooer (which we went through several models of…) it still wouldn’t get completely rid of the smell and he would still mark. Any time we opened the windows, the humidity from outside would reactivate the crystals and the whole room would smell again. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and ripped the carpet out.
Now that’s a drastic step, I know, but it was disgusting before we moved in we just couldn’t afford to fix the problem then. Removing the carpet was only the first step. The next thing I had to do was remove the baseboards because the urine had wicked up into the baseboards which were made out of compressed dust and swollen. The only thing remaining with the smell was the wooden subfloor. There’s no way I’m replacing those, so I decided to seal them so no moisture could ever reach the crystals.
The Sealing method:
Regular paint won’t work as a good sealant for this kind of job as over time, the molecular structure has holes big enough for water to pass through. Now I don’t own a scanning electron microscope, but I know this because when I tried regular latex paint, humid and rainy days would reactivate the stink. In my research I found that Shellac had incredibly small pores once dry. Zinsser BIN is a white-pigmented premixed shellac sealer. This stuff is often used and marketed for permanently sealing in odors from smoke damage, mold and mildew, and pet odors. It works great! I must warn you, it the shellac is in a denatured alcohol solvent. Basically, it smells like you are pouring vodka on the floor and you definitely need a lot of ventilation.
Putting down several coats of this will seal in the stink for good, then you can replace the baseboards and treat the floor. In our old house we used these peel and stick floor planks. In our current home, we actually just painted the subfloor in the whole room which gave it a really cool industrial look. We then made this room into our home office. It was also a great place to play guitar and sing due to all the echos. We left it this way until we could afford to redo the floor in the other parts of the house.
The Enzyme Method:
On our concrete slab, we also had pet odor issues. This time I went for the other method, using enzymes to remove the crystals all together. To kill the pet stank and prevent our cats from marking or remarking the areas, I treated the floor after removing the carpets. The entire floor had to be treated, so I had to do smaller areas one at a time. We’ve had experience with Simple Green enzyme odor removers in the past, but they had a fragrance that left the floor smelling like a port-a-potty. Another cleaner I got was Enzyme D which is hugely popular and used in many schools for cleaning body fluids, however after ordering a case of the stuff, I saw that its ingredients included a benzene-based salt in it. I’m no chemist, so I called the company. They were nice enough to connect me to their chemist who told me that the benzene is harmless since it was bound up in a salt. From what I know, salts dissociate in solvents such as water, which (in my mind) would leave benzene ions loose and floating in the solution. Salts also form crystals when the water dries up, so unless you plan on super flushing the scene with water, there will be traces of benzene salt everywhere. With Jess expecting, I wasn’t about to risk it though, so we returned that cleaner.
The cleaner I ended up getting is the absolute best we’ve ever used! Vet’s Best Total Plus stain remover has a very mild fragrance which dissipated completely in a couple of days. It has enzymes as well as bacteria in it to help remove odors. Since the odors were really bad, I saturated the slab of concrete with this cleaner and quickly covered the area with giant plastic bags or plastic painters tarp. I then sat books and heavy boxes on the perimeter to keep the liquid contained as long as possible. The longer this stuff is liquid, the better it works. I let this sit and eat away at the crystals for 3 or 4 days before removing the plastic and moving on t o the next section of flooring. This process took about 2 weeks to completely remove the pet odors from the entire concrete slab. I let the floor dry for a few days before putting down the flooring we chose, which you can read about in another post.
This completely removed the stink in all weather conditions, and our cats no longer feel the urge to purge on the floor. It has been some 2 years at this point and we’ve yet to have another incident or to smell anything!
UPDATE: WE’ve come across another great cleaner called Bioclean Bac-Out which uses enzymes and has a nice fresh lime scent. Since cats don’t like citrus smells this can help give them more of an aversion to using the same spot twice if there are accidents I’ve found.