This is the story of what I can only say is true love for an animal. We might still turn him into slippers as winter draws closer, but for now our cat Shadow is safe from harm.
Direct link to photos here
We discovered in the recent months that for some reason Shadow had been urinating on the carpeted floor upstairs near the bathroom. I tried a plethora of store bought things to clean and remove the scent, we tried placing tin foil on the floor to hinder him wanting to go near it (we read that cats don’t like walking on tin foil on the floor and while seems that it was true, but he managed to not walk on the foil and still pee on it).
I read that a mixture of 1/2 vinegar and water could be applied, let to soak for five minutes and then toweled up. That seemed to work once, and again twice, but the third time I did it I think I left the vinegar for more than five minutes. I toweled it up hoping for the best, but after time we started to notice a faint odor again so we decided we were going to rip out that section of carpet and padding and replace it sooner rather than later. Eventually we plan to put all hardwood upstairs so this is a temporary fix, even so we didn’t want to deal with that smell and stained area all winter.
So on Friday when it was too rainy to go hiking we decided to fix this. We started to pull the carpet back and realized what we were smelling was only the beginning. Not only was the padding sticky and gross, but the floor had become saturated and smelled pretty stinky. This suddenly became a much bigger project than we had anticipated.
So we cut out the gross floor. We let it dry overnight. Had to baby-gate the area to keep the cats off of it, which meant we were rather trapped in the bedroom/bathroom area during that time too (do not try to climb over doubled baby-gates while half asleep, this is your only warning). Sent Michael to store for supplies (note, this is trip one of three in a 24-hour period). Painted the area with Kilz paint. Double painted it. Stopped for the night. showered all the disgusting off and treated ourselves to homemade sundaes with our new ship cream dispenser.
On Saturday we went to the Home Depot since some of the materials Michael bought had been mislabeled and were not the correct depth. Returned a bunch of stuff. Lowes did not have any 3/8 underlayment, so we went to Home Depot. Found a small piece of 11/32 that was just big enough and decided since it was a temporary fix we could shim the difference since we figure we are ripping out all underlayment when we redo the floors in the next year or so. Also got self-adhesive tiles to cover the floor instead of trying to deal with scraps of carpet that might just be destroyed again if any lingering smell was detected by the evil Shadow cat.
Now that we had the correct supplies, we decided to work on the floor some more. WE only put another layer of paint down though.
Sunday we prepped and painted the first coat on the kitchen wall. See previous blog entry for those fun times and the third trip to the home improvement store in about 24 hours.
Sunday night after a hard day of painting we decided to work on the floor some more. I was determined to finish it, thinking we only had an hour or so left. We had to make our small piece of wood fint into the section of floor we had cut out. Why we didn’t use perpendicular lines and exact 90 degreee angle shall remain a mystery to me, but in the end, we did it with both our wood and our cardbord shim to go under the wood. That turned into nearly three hours, but we finished. Quality wise I am pleased with the results.
I’m going to spare you all the gory details here and just let you see the end product:
Not indicated in this photo is that I touched up the paint at the bottom of the yellow wall today as well. When we redo the entire floor and put molding up, you will never notice the difference since it is the same yellow.