Ugh! I spent THREE HOURS on hands and knees yesterday, trying to scrub Ruby’s puppy pee stink off the living room floor.
Ruby, who is about as un-housetrained as a dog can get, has stealth-pissed repeatedly in the living room. A couple of times it seeped under the bookcases and the baseboards, and once it went under the folding desk in there and saturated at least one of the ball-shaped wood legs.
Of course I frantically wiped it up as best as I could, and I’ve sprayed the floor several times with the ridiculous enzyme spray. Luz mops every two weeks, too, leaving the place looking — if not smelling — great.
Now, for the first time in years, come the rains. And what with all that moisture in the air, the stink wafts into the atmosphere. WHAT a stench!!! I couldn’t walk into the room without gagging.
So I started scrubbing, trying to get that out of the grout. Eventually the ceiling-to-floor bookcases will have to be emptied and moved and their “feet” scrubbed with something (what, I can’t imagine) and the tile under them scrubbed and the baseboard pulled out and new strips put down and painted. But for the nonce, deodorizing the parts I can reach will have to suffice.
Understand: this tilework was “sealed” by the previous owner, who installed it. He used one of those goopy grout seals that lays down like a coat of acrylic paint — it is impervious. And STILL it stinks. You can tell where the stuff is saturated by putting your nose down near the floor and sniffing. Phew!
Here’s how the various chemicals I tried worked:
• Simple Green: useless
• Enzyme spray: laughable
• Straight vinegar: helps a little in places that aren’t too badly saturated. Dissolves and lifts some neglected patches of urine up. Gets the smell off the tiles pretty well, but leaves the tracks of grout still stinking.
• Peroxide: hard to tell…all I had on hand is the stuff for contact lenses, and not much of that.
• Baking soda solution: nearly useless
• Vinegar puddled into the grout line with baking soda sprinkled over it, then scrubbed into the grout and over the tiles and then washed (and washed, and washed) with clean water: helps a little more than just straight vinegar. Worst spots still stink enough to choke you.
• BUT: tile and grout cleaner, when sprayed to puddle into the grout lines where the worst of the stink is identified (French art books to John Irving; Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes 8 to 16), allowed to sit for 8 or ten minutes, and scrubbed off: that works!
So if you have a dog stink on your floors, you might want to try the stuff made specifically as tile and grout cleaner. It’s readily available at Home Depot, Lowe’s, and hardware stores. Obviously, this is intended only for tilework, not for carpets or wood flooring. I don’t expect I’d put it on natural stone, either…
Don’t know if it would work on cat pee, which is much stronger and more persistent than dog urine. But it’s surely worth a try. Also the recipe described in this post about wood floors supposedly is effective on cat urine. I’ve never tried it, but it’s all over the Net, so apparently some folks have had success with it.
Ruby, an exceptionally unhappy dog, is now confined to her X-pen or tied to a leash all the time she’s in the house. Period. She’s not getting loose to stealth-pee or dump again!
She’s getting two weeks (2, ii, II weeks!) to shape up, or she’s outta here. I am puppied out! And I believe this particular dog to be essentially untrainable when it comes to figuring out where the doggy bathroom is. She’s seven and a half months old and still peeing and dumping all over the house.
In my time on this planet, I’ve raised eight puppies and never had any problem housetraining them within a reasonable length of time. One of them was house-trained in two days. Okay…that was some kind of World Dog Training Olympics Record. But the others all got the idea within two or three weeks. The problem is, she’s so adept at sneaking that you can’t catch her in the act. The other day M’hijito and I were in the same room with her and she managed to deposit a puddle without either of us spotting her!
And no, just now she does not have a UTI. She stopped peeing every 15 to 30 minutes as soon as she went back on the Clavamox.
So, as a last resort, I’m using a technique I applied to Anna the German Shepherd when she was in her furniture-eating phase: Tie the dog to myself or to a doorknob in whatever room I happen to be in, and NEVER let her roam free in the house, ever. When I’m not here, she goes in her crate. When I’m doing something where I can’t attend to her and watch her every single living breathing minute, she goes in her X-pen.
Add to that the standard puppy house-training gambit: take her out every two hours and encourage her to do her thing.
If she doesn’t have the picture after two weeks of that, she’s going back to the breeder.
I’ll discuss this with the vet when I go in for another financial fleecing this morning. Yesterday I thought she had some conjunctivitis, but now it’s cleared up. Still have the 9 a.m. appointment, though. We’ll see what he says about this scheme. If he doesn’t think it’ll work, then she’s going back to Zion Corgis forthwith. Today!
