How to clean up cat urine

IF you have a cat that has urinated or made a mess where it shouldn’t it is important to clean up properly.

If not it is likely to return to relieve itself in the same spot. Here are a few tips:

• One should clean up when the cat is not in the room, otherwise the cat thinks its mark gets attention.

• Consider redecorating after cleaning up if the spraying has been going on for a long time.

• Never use bleaches or disinfectants. They smell like urine to a cat, as does anything pine, rose or lemon scented.

• Disinfectants that go cloudy are poisonous to cats.

• Use warm water with 10 per cent solution of biological washing liquid or powder. 

• Alternatively use one tablespoon of Napisan and one tablespoon of biological washing powder to one pint of water. Then rinse the area thoroughly in cold water and let it dry or dry it with a hair dryer if time presses. 

• Next spray surgical spirit. Use a nail brush to get this into fabric and crevices. This gets rid of the fatty residues that prompt a cat to top up his own marks. Dry this off completely.

• Any curtains that have been sprayed with urine should be sent to the dry cleaners and linen machine washed.

• With moveable mats and small carpets get these cleaned somehow if you can or throw away.

• Do not try to save money on cleaning because in the long run the more thorough one is the cheaper it all will be. A spraying/middening cat can cause a lot of grief and nothing is too much to stop it early on.

• The edge where the skirting board meets laminated flooring will have a pool of spray urine if the site has been used repeatedly. Use a silicon sealant between the two. Then cover with heavy varnish of the sort used to varnish boats to make a barrier between the sprayed urine pool area and the outside world.

• The intersection between tiles collects a pool. Clean the tiles – scrub in the intersection – then put the heavy boat varnish in the intersection or even over all the tile surface as well.