HELP!! Company to professionally deal with cat smell in house!!!

[Yadiya]

Looking for a company that can come, assess and deal with the cat stench in a house we just bought

Anyone please HELP!!

Thank you

Try charcoal bags?

Liberally sprinkle bicarb of soda everywhere, leave a day or two and hoover up. Wash carpets thoroughly (hire a firm in or hire a carpet cleaner), clean all other areas with a steam cleaner.

Whatever the flooring is, take it up.

You'll never get rid of the smell.

Personally, I’d rip out the carpets and underlay and investigate whether cat pee has soaked into the floorboards. They might need replacing too. Poor you! Was it bad when you viewed it?

What kind of smell and where? In my experience of cat ownership the only thing that smells with cats is urine on carpet which is impossible to get rid of

We moved in to a flat which had had 17 indoor cats in it previously. Got it very cheaply for this reason. The smell will be in carpets and curtains, if you’re lucky. It won’t ever go away but you can strip out the carpets and curtains and get rid. Wet cleaning the carpet is likely to just fully activate the smell. Dry cleaners do have specific treatments for curtains that might be worth trying. We had stripped wooden floors. We had to have the floorboards replaced in a box room that had been where the litter trays were kept, along with tongue and groove panelling on the walls, all rotten and saturated with pee. In other places there was crystallised cat pee on the underside of the floor. We put down carpets with thick underlay and tried not to think about it too much. One room was always a bit smelly in damp weather. If it’s localised you can saturate with a strong solution of bio washing powder, leave to dry and repeat. Good luck.

Take carpets/flooring up. We had similar. Only with dogs. Urine soaked right through to the floors so we took everything up and cleaned it and dried it out before replacing flooring.

Smell gone!

We had the same problem, just get rid of carpets clean the floor well and it will go. Do not try to clean the carpets, that wont work

A friend had this and had to literally start again with the floors. It has soaked in the wood under the carpet, so they had to replace the floor boards

Thank you everyone

A bit more info..

There are no carpets in the house now, but there were in the two bedrooms upstairs before a hard bamboo floor was put an year ago

The living room had hard floor when they moved in, so that is ok. No bad smell there

I can feel the smell in the kitchen and it is still there even after a bottle of domestos on the tiles

I am 9 months pregnant with baby 2 and getting really desperate as the more info I dig up, the more likely it seems that the lovely new floor needs to go and underneath it lies the problem. We have tried soda, vinegar, air purifier, essential oils, and enzyme cleaners on the floors. The smell has not changed a bit

I am at a point where I am looking for a company to advise on the best way forward

For those of you that had your underfloor treated/changed, did the people that do the job have any cat odour removal experience or were they normal carpenters? How much does it roughly cost for 2 not big rooms?

Thank you

Is it possible that cats have got under the kitchen units at some point? I can’t think of the name but one of the base panels under our units is loose our cat used to love scrambling about under there. A few of our foster cats have liked lurking in there too. Could you try taking a plinth(? Is that what it’s called?) off and have a sniff? If it is under there you could try using a UV torch to find where the pee is. If the floor is tiled I really don’t think the smell would come through.

Have you decorated? A prime spot for cats spraying on walls is beside an outside door, marking territory. The smell could then be coming from the plaster if it was really saturated. I would think waterproof paint would seal it in. If it was a male cat spraying that is very persistent and I could imagine it eating through paint, it is corrosive to steel.

Have you had a really good sniff in every corner to see if you can locate the source? Check it isn’t something like a dodgy lightbulb, they can smell bad, apparently.

Finally, can other people smell it? Or is it just your pregnant nose? I remember being able to smell coffee from half a mile when I was pregnant.

@Chemenger I was then going to suggest taking the kitchen kick boards off. We had this smell in the kitchen when we moved. We ripped up the old vinyl flooring in there so we could replace it with tiles and in doing so happened to take the kick boards off and realised the smell was actually coming from under the cupboards!

In a bedroom it we had to rip up the carpet and underlay and replace it. I did try cleaning the carpet originally which was ok for few days then the smell returned as was absorbed in underlay. When the carpet and underlay was up we left the windows open in that room for a while to air it and I shook bi carb all over the floor boards which seemed to do the trick.

Also I don’t think bleach actually kills the odour of cat pee. I remember googling loads for ways to get rid when we moved here! Have your kitchen tiles got grout in? If so the smell is probably lingering there and the grout is porous. The utility here is tiled floor which we didn’t want to have to remove, I cleaned the floor so many times but the smell never went until I sprayed all the grout with a cat pee cleaner and then scrubbed it all in with a tooth brush and left it for 30 minutes then I used my hand held steam mop with a grout attachment brush on and steamed it all, followed by a quick mop which disinfectant and the smell has disappeared!

I agree with other posters - the key is finding exactly where the smell is coming from first. It would be sods law you spend an absolute fortune replacing floors then discover it was somewhere else!

Kick boards/plinths in the kitchen are a good idea. Ours aren't properly fixed in place (will fix them one day... maybe!) and whenever they've fallen over my cat is absolutely desperate to get under them. She went in there on the day we moved in and came out absolutely disgusting and covered in cobwebs and crap

Hello

Thank you for the advice about the kitchen

I will discuss with DH to see if he can move things about. We did see that under the fridge (they left for us) there's a lot of hair..

A man from a company that offers the service of getting rid of pet odours is coming on Thursday to assess and spray everything with these enzyme solutions. He also has a professional UV light to hopefully detect where the problem areas are.

My hope is that if it doesn't get rid of the smell entirely, It would at least reduce it so that I can tolerate it for a few months until I go home to my parents with the kids and hubby can work on the house without us. At least treating the walls should be helpful..
He can do it all himself, and his friends are all in the construction business, so at least it would not cost a fortune. It's the mess that I want to avoid with a newborn...

Oh .. and yes

I am not the only one to smell it

Everyone does

It's just that husband can sleep in that bedroom and I cannot

Do you know for certain that the previous owners had (a) cat(s)? I'm asking because I thought for a while our cat had weed on the new laminate in my daughter's bedroom. When I was complaining about this to a friend of mine, she asked whether I had recently painted the room with Valspar paint from B&Q, which I had. Turns out the paint was missing a preservative, which had caused bacteria to grow on the walls, hence the smell! www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40655163

I was about to mention Valspar paint and see I've been beaten to it! Worth a thought ...

Have you pulled the fridge out and cleaned the back? The coils of the fridge in our catty flat we’re covered in greasy cat hair, and, since they’re warm, were a very good smell generator.

We have not decorated as the there is no immediate need for it. The room was painted an year ago according to the previous owners but don't know what paint was used.
I actually had a friend come over and he confirmed it is a cat smell

We have seen the cats- hard not to as they were 4 of them!

The room is also the worst in the main bedroom. The 3rd bedroom which they used as storage has been painted, but doesn't smell at all!

So had a man from a professional cleaning company over today

He had one of these UV torches that can detect urine. He didn't see much and definitely not able to say where the smell in the main bedroom was coming from

He sprayed everything with biological enzymes and said they work for 7 days

I think it worked for the kitchen area, but not so much for the bedroom

We are now lost as to where this smell is coming from?
He believes one would not leave the old underlay when removing carpets and laying in hard floors...

Hi,
You have my sympathy, it is horrific.
I have been through this and managed to fully get rid of the odour after 12 months of trialling everything else. Here is what I did in order:
Stripped out carpets and soft furnishings
Washed sown every hard surface with sugar soap
Washed downs every hard surface with enzyme disinfectant
Got a professional company in to fog the place (useless, smell was back in a week)
Removed all flooring right down to the joists in the worst affected areas and replaced.
Stripped out plasterboard to waist high in worst affected rooms and replaced and re-plastered
Polyurethane varnish sealed all other floors to prevent smell before adding new flooring on top
After all this - the smell was still there - as bad as ever, it would make your eyes water.

I then as a last resort, went to a company that hires out equipment for flood and fire damage.
I hired an industrial ozone generator for a week and we didn't stay in the house (very dangerous, remove all plants and pets too), I just returned daily to move the machine to the next room.

Amazingly, it worked. Smell definitely gone. Never to return. The machine wasn't even that expensive to hire. About £200 for the week.

I bet its the bedroom paint!!

@Myfutureisland Oh my!!
This was scary to read

When you stripped your floors, did you actually see the soaked underfloor?

There were barely any patches in our house

Today, almost 24h after spraying, downstairs is fine. The main bedroom still smells the same. The second bedroom still has its own different smell that at least I can tolerate. For that one, I could believe its the paint, but for the main bedroom- the smell is too saturated....

Hi,
Yes, in the hall, kitchen, downstairs WC and utility room you could see some staining on the joists. This is despite the hall having originally had tiles over a chipboard sub floor!
We couldn't rip up and replace everything, it's impossible.
I found after the professional fogging we had carried out in the early days, the smell unfortunately returned a week or two later. It just seemed to mask it rather that neutralise it.
I also used to feel that the smell clung to and permeated our belongings. After the ozone treatment, it was definitely gone.
Hope it all works for you as it's a terrible pain to have to deal with.

Did you not consider just selling the house?