Carpet vs. Cat

I’ve always been a cat lover. My favorite stuffed animal growing up was “Lion King” and I treasured my first cat, “Patches,” whom I received for my 5th birthday. Among my friends I was known for my love of cats and by the time I graduated high school our family owned three of them. In college I would even FaceTime with my cats. To be honest, I never really viewed them as animals – they were always a part of our family.

On May 21st, 2016, this drastically changed. DISCLAIMER: This post is not for the weak-stomached. 

Have you ever walked into someone’s house and just knew they had cats? I wouldn’t say our house was quite that bad, probably because it was uninhabited when we first saw it, but it quickly became clear that a cat ruled this house. RULED. No joke, I firmly believe it even had its own room.

To quote our inspector…

Floors Carpet: Rooms and areas other than hard surfaced >> End of life. Aged, staining, typical homeowner maintenance required. … Carpets nearing end of life, deep cleaning unlikely to clear staining and traffic patterns. Consider replacement.

I’d say he put it nicely.

Since we didn’t have it in the budget to replace all the carpet before we moved in, Andrew and I decided the least we could do is rent a RugDoctor and clean out what we could.

On May 21st, 2016, I began cleaning our carpets. I preventatively vacuumed before bringing out the heavy machinery. After pushing the RugDoctor no more than 15 feet in our bedroom, I noticed it was making a strange sound. I stopped, tilted the RugDoctor back, and pulled out this:

Oh my gosh, I’m going to throw up. Writing this during lunch was not a good idea.

Cat: 1. Carpet: 0.

We went over our bedroom carpet at least twice with the RugDoctor and once over the carpet upstairs. We had to pull out the recurring blanket of hair every few minutes. We collected it all in a plastic bag and put it outside due to the deceased animal smell.

After we cleaned the carpet in our bedroom, the action had stirred up the… sediment… and our bedroom smelled like… animal. Thankfully when the carpet dried the smell subsided, but that was only an omen of what was to come.

Bjjjjjwwwwwvvvverrrrrrrp. The date is now June 11th, 2016.

Andrew bought a black light so we could hunt for scorpions and determine if our pesticide-spraying efforts paid off (more on this later). We also had recently learned that black lights are useful for finding pet stains on carpet………………………………………………..

Everywhere, you guys. EVERYWHERE. This is just our bedroom. Where we sleep and breathe for 8+ hours/day.

Cat: 2. Carpet: 0.

There were several stains going up the stairs (and an atrocious amount of hair), but they did look better after a good vacuum and shampoo. The landing upstairs was just as bad as our bedroom, with more intensified stains. The thing that kind of creeps me out, though, is the bedroom at the end of the hallway. I’ll refer to it here-on-out as the Cat Kingdom.

The Cat Kingdom is the smallest bedroom in our house. To enter, you must open the ginormous 90’s baby gate and step over the thread-bare carpet, as seen below:

5 Reasons to Support the Validity of the Cat Kingdom (from least to greatest)

1. The massive amount of cat hair wadded up around the edges of the room
2. The abundance of cat litter spilled in the closet
3. The door removed from the closet where cat box was located
4. The highest concentration and intensity of cat urine stains in the house
5. This light switch:

Look at it – It’s staring at you! Watching over its domain!

Cat: 3,539. Carpet: -3

So, what’s next, you ask? To stay in budget, Andrew and I are planning to tear out the carpet in our bedroom and possibly paint the concrete! More to come on this later. Until we can replace the floors upstairs, Cat Kingdom shall prevail…

Unfortunately, this whole experience has completely turned me off to the idea of having a cat as a pet. Maybe someday when my future kids are begging for a kitten, I’ll have moved past this episode… and I’ll be OK with cleaning our house 17 times per week. Yeah…. right. 😉

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