Old Cat Pee Smell Help

[northern_sunshine]

This is my first post here (I think, I kinda drive by post sometimes ). I have a small problem. I tried googling with mothering in the search and only yielded a couple results and a lot of hits of places trying to sell me a bunch of chemicals. :

I have 4 kitties, all are indoor cats (2 shelter adopts, 1 from a friends cats litter and 1 we found last Christmas abandoned at our work). We had some issues with one having inappropriate peeing issues. She was found to have recurring UTI's & crystals and is now on a special diet and doing spectacular!!

However, I recently started noticing that my rocker recliner has a funky smell. Sometimes it smells like cat pee, but sometimes it just smells period. We don't have a lot of furniture so it gets a lot of use and I don't know how I didn't notice it sooner, to be honest. :

I've located the area of the odor, it's in one corner of the seat. The cushion is not removable and I'd assume if it is cat pee, it's soaked down quite a bit. How would I go about removing the odor? I'd like to avoid buying a bunch of chemicals and can't really afford a huge jug of Nature's Miracle. So I was kinda looking for a natural alternative. I do have access to a carpet shampooer (which I'm sure I'll need to get whatever mixture I use on it back out of it) I hate to get rid of the chair itself cause it's got lots of life left (even after 6 years) and is so very comfy.

TIA!

[thekimballs]

Nature's Miracle has a small spray bottle that should have more than enough. There's also a semi-generic called Simple Solution that works pretty well. You could use Bac-Out if you have that for diapers--but there aren't really any household solutions that work well. Some mask the smell for a while, but the animals know that it's there and may revisit the spot--and I have found that eventually the smell comes back even to my nose when I don't use the NM.

[northern_sunshine]

Should I just dump it onto the cushion and let it dry in there and then shampoo or let it soak for a couple hours and then extract it with the shampooer?

[thekimballs]

Spray it on, rub it to make it soak in, spray more--make sure it really is saturated all the way down to the pee. Then let it dry. Don't shampoo, clean, or otherwise mess with it--just let it dry. It may take a few days. If there is still smell after two weeks, saturate it again and let dry.

[boongirl]

Just wanted to add two things. The reason you have to saturate it is that the enzymes wil only work if they are all the way down to where the pee soaked. Also the enzymes only work when wet. So, you don't actually have to let it dry. You could repeat several times in one day to get it really saturated. We do this all the time with our cats. We have one with kidney disease and he occasionally gets too sore or unhappy or whatever to get up and use the litter box and just pees where he is sleeping. His new meds are helping him, though, which is good.

Keep saturating until the pee smell is gone. Then, give it a shampoo. You might also think about the kidney disease issue. It may be the kitty has this, too.

[thekimballs]

According to NM, and I have found it to be true, you do have to let it dry. The NM bottle specifically says that it may smell until everything has completely dried (up to two weeks) I've had spots that smelled up to a week, but once everything was really dry, no more smell.

Also, once you shampoo, you can't use NM again and have it guaranteed to work. It works only on real urine, not on shampoo-soaked urine spots. So since there's no real need to shampoo (the surface isn't really dirty; the smell has absorbed into the stuffing), I would advise against it until you've given the NM time to work and then dry.

I've messed around with a LOT of carpet de-smellers and cleaners and shampoos; nothing consistently works as well as saturating the spot and then letting it dry.

As an aside, we finally realized (duh!) that the former owners of this 1950s house must have had multiple dogs peeing on the rug and that's why we have had trouble housebreaking puppies here. Doug pulled up the carpets, exposing 60's linoleum (yech! huge reno job, here we come) and sure enough, there were hundreds of spots of dried liquids all through the carpet and padding. So even though I couldn't smell the pee, the dogs could. NM is the only thing I've found to not just clean it but truly deodorize it from the dogs.