Wretched Cats

You may remember how I gushed about my cats in the post entitled Annabelle and Payton.

Well, I'm not gushing today. I'm actually considering finding a 12-gauge shotgun to rid my life of the prolific poopers who defiled my basement.

For several months, I've noticed the faint smell of cat litter - "and then some" - wafting throughout our house. Most people either didn't notice it or politely insisted that they didn't when they actually did and then decided to never visit our house again. No matter how often we scooped the cat box and replaced the litter and sprinkled it with deodorizer and sprayed liberal amounts of Lysol Neutra-Air, the smell lingered.

Situation unacceptable.

"Luckily" (I think), my daughter and her buddy recently discovered the gruesome truth: the cats had found an alternate outhouse under the basement stairs. This is in a small room that houses the furnace. However, there is a small piece of drywall cutaway for access to the furnace from the outside of the room - this is where the kitties found their entrance.

I asked my husband to address the mess while I started dinner - partly because I'm allergic to dust and pet dander, and partly because I didn't want the disgusting job of chipping up dried cat poo.

My poor, poor husband then faced a grisly mess that he could only describe as a "ball pit". We had conveniently forgotten (for a day or two) that the smell of such things embeds itself into anything and everything, even after the initial clean up. So, even though the visible mess is cleaned up, we now embark on the formidable task of erasing the cat odor. Since the incident (or many, many, many incidents, I should say) took place in the furnace room, the smell does indeed pervade the entire house.

Today's task is to clean the basement floor - repeatedly - the goal being to get enough ammonia out of the concrete so that we don't asphyxiate ourselves when we bleach the heck out of the floor.

Wish me luck. And remind me again why I love my cats so much.