Just to demonstrate, after the last post, that I actually am going around the bend …
So we have the new guest room pretty much in shape for, well, guests. In particular, my parents, arriving Thursday.
Just one small problem (aside from wanting to clean off the desktop, get the tchotchke shelves stocked, etc.). The room has been … haunted … over the years … by … cats.
Yeah.
The real solution is that we need to replace the carpet. Which is true for pretty much the whole house, and that’s not going to happen between now and Thursday afternoon, so …
… I ask Doyce if I can borrow his carpet cleaner, and he says sure, and, rather than bringing it over on Sunday, he softly, silently, slips it into the garage on Monday, after Margie’s gotten home …
And I begin to clean the carpet. And, given the state of the carpet, I’m running the machine on Heavy, Nay, Ungodly Traffic, and using the bottle of Pet-Stain-Be-Gone Bissell “Pet Odor and Soil” carpet cleaner stuff which Doyce left with the cleaner.
Which, needless to say, rapidly gets exhausted.
At which point, I see the white whale on the horizon and head that direction.
King Soopers? Nope. They have the normal, non-Pet-related Bissell cleaner, but not the Real Thing.
Walgreens? Nope.
Safeway? Nope.
I call Doyce. Get his voice mail. I check in with Margie, who is far more tolerant of all this than I have any right to expect. She checks the Bissell page, and calls me back to let me know that Petco and Lowe’s supposedly have The Real Thing.
I go to Petco. Nope. They have various off-brand anti-pet-odor things, supposedly rated for carpet cleaners, but I do not weaken, do not give in. Somewhere, that purple bottle is out there, mocking me …
Lowe’s is, ironically, too inconvenient to drive to. So I go to Home Depot, instead. Nope. I form a contingency plan, and pick up some Zep High Traffic Carpet Cleaner, Good for Pet Stains, Too. But that’s just a fall-back position ….
I go to PetSmart (“Like Petco But Without Actual Pets”). Nope. Various off-brand organic orange-flavored carpet cleaners … but I won’t give up. It tasks me, and I will have it!
I drive to the Belly of the Beast, Wal-Mart. They don’t even have carpet cleaner fluids, unless they are with the carpet cleaners (which I also cannot find — I flee before I become one of the Pod People).
I limp home, some 90 minutes after I left. I finish the job with the Zep — too foamy, it is, yet I trust it will do the job.
Let’s see how the room smells tomorrow …
You don’t want to hear this, but after pulling up carpet that had been thoroughly “gotten” by my late cat before we discovered he was diabetic, and painting the subfloor with 2 coats of Kilz and putting down most of a floating wood floor, there’s still a faint whiff of eau de feline in the little extra room we have.
But it’s very, very faint, and I don’t notice it unless it’s a really hot day. I suspect the entire closet needs to be Kilz0rd and repainted on the inside, and that would do it.
Yeah, I’d just as soon not hear that … 🙂
Wow. I had no idea this stuff was hard to find.
Go to Target — it’s all there by the vacuum cleaners and carpet stuff.
Prolly the one place I *didn’t* go in my peregrinations (since it was a long block further away). I thought of it, but … 🙂
Silly me — I should have gone to Best Buy — which is always the location I think of when it comes to Pet Stain Removal Carpet Shampoo.