Could You Please be Quiet?

I think that is what Cat is saying. He had been asleep on the sofa until Dh began pulling up the vinyl or linoleum or whatever it is on the laundry room floor. It's a noisy project - he has to chip up the edges and then pull and tear the stuff out. Cat is annoyed.

However, the reason that the flooring is coming out is NOT because it's twenty years old and worn (which it is), NOT because I don't like it (which I don't) but because it REEKS....of cat urine. It doesn't have a scent, or a smell, or an aroma. It has a stench.

We have tried every solution to this problem: putting in a second litter box; coating the floor with stuff that didn't get rid of the smell so much as just change the stench to something almost as bad; putting the water dish where he had peed (from the Humane Society site), and feeding Cat outdoors so he could make it to his outdoor bathroom more quickly. But each time, after only a couple of days of success, Cat went back to his new old habit: using the floor as his litter box. He has been to the vet's, had lots of expensive tests, is on cat glucosomine in case his arthritis is a problem, and nothing is working.

So now we (that's the royal we) are ripping out the flooring. We don't know what to do next. DH wants tile, but with tile comes grout, and I see problems with grout absorbing cat pee. I want self-stick, foot-square tiles because if one is damaged, or absorbs you-know-what, it's easy to replace. But the woman at the flooring department at Home Depot said that the self-stick tiles don't stick all that well.

So we're flummoxed.

Maybe drugs (for us or for the cat, whatever works).