Remodeling the House of Pee Pee

Remodeling is always rough, whether you do it yourself or get a contractor.  And I've got to quit fooling myself.  The "oh, I'll just paint the upstairs and put in laminate floors" is a remodel.  

Because doing work like this is never 'just' anything.

So I got myself a crew of hapless teenagers (no, really, we'd love to help! they cried when I told them that they couldn't come spend the night because there's too much work to do.  Bet they're not coming back any time soon) and we painted the ceiling.  So far so good.  Then I started pulling stuff off the walls, filling in holes, moving furniture, you know the routine.

And I thought (this was perhaps my second mistake, the first being that I should start do this as a DIY project in the first place) since I'm moving all this heavy furniture anyway, why move it again when I have to rip up the carpet?  Besides, I'll just have a little peek at the dining room floor and see why it's a little higher than the rest of the floor.

And it was wood.  Not nice, no, not anymore anyway.  So I thought (argh) that I'll just pull up the dining room rug before I put the gigantic table back, and we'll still be in livable space.

I had forgotten something important.

We have six cats.  At one point, before all these six cats, we had a geriatric cat who decided that the far corner in the dining room was actually a cat box.  I'd cleaned up as best I could back there after she passed away (RIP, China kitty) and I figured the scent would have faded.  And it had.  When I pulled up the carpet there, the pad underneath was stained, but it didn't reek.

I'd forgotten, though, that the people before us had all kinds of dogs and cats.

And the wood floors under the pad were, well, odiferous.

I didn't notice at first.  No, it wasn't until I got the idea of first sweeping and mopping and then scrubbing the floor against the back wall that it became eye-wateringly clear.

OMG.

Stay tuned for the continuing story when, after Kami sprays with first enzyme cleaner and then bleach, she says to no one in particular, "does the smell in here just keep getting worse and worse, or do I just have really bad BO?"