I'm a clean freak, and I'm really suffering right now. Our ten-year old female cat has destroyed a fourth of our tiny living space - made it uninhabitable for humans, anyway. She has a box, but she pees on the floor in a wide swathe that runs from my clothes closet to a place about four feet away under some computer cables. I keep mopping, but the mop head is basically picking up urine - and I somehow can't rinse it all out, so the next day, I mop up the new urine and end up spreading some of the old back on the floor again. It's a wood floor, and it's totally dried and cracked from the chemicals I've tried as I attempt to keep up with this flood of pee every day.
The smell around my clothes was so bad I had to move them all out of the closet. So my clothes and our winter coats were just in piles on a couple of chairs in the main room for months. It got so bad that my hubby went to Bed Bath and Beyond and got us both some two-tier retail racks on wheels. So our clothes are now arranged on the racks, far removed from the pee-soaked floor. But the cat is still peeing in the closet, and she's also doing it on the computer cables in the far corner.
I had tried taping the cables to the wall but they kept falling down. I was going to staple them up, but never got around to it. It's hard to mop under them, and sometimes I get so discouraged that I just - don't.
DH and I couldn't work in this terrible smelling place anymore, so we rented a separate office and studio in a different building. Every day I go down there and work happily in a cat-free room, but I have to come home every night to peemageddon. We're in a cold damp climate - nothing ever dries here. So now there's a bunch of weird mold growing in the closet from the endless urine deposits and my attempts to mop up with cleaners. I would like to hire a cleaning crew to deal with it. DH and I are sneezing like crazy. But I'm actually embarrassed by this stuff and I hate the thought of anyone else seeing how we've been living.
The vet said she might have a bladder crystal condition. They gave her some medicine and we put her on wet food, and she seemed to be doing pretty well - was using her box for a while. Now we're back to square one.
We'll be moving soon to an apartment closer to where our offices are. There's no reason for me to think that the cat won't keep peeing on the floor in our new place, so I'm pretty much out of hope...
In a case like this where the cat is going to pee outside the box no matter what, would it be better to rent a place with carpets, wood or linoleum? Any other thoughts welcome...