For the past two months, our lives have been consumed with house renovations…HOUSE RENOVATIONS…but yet we live in an RV!
We own a house in Missouri, that we converted into rental property when we moved to Florida about five years ago. In December, our first and only tenant gave notice and moved. We knew we would have a big job in front of us to turn the property around for the next tenant, but the big job turned out to be a HUGE job! We spent every spare moment between work and sleep at the house trying to get it cleaned up.
The tenant had pets that she didn’t clean after very well and the smell was overwhelming (by the way, overwhelming is an understatement). We had addressed odor issues in the past and thought it would be somewhat bad, but oh my goodness. Most of the carpet had been removed already, exposing the hardwood floors. We were glad of that, because if the carpet remained, we couldn’t imagine how much worse the smell could be.
The remaining carpet was in the kitchen and mud room and was immediately removed so we could start the cleaning process. (I know…why have carpet in the kitchen? It was like that when I bought the house and even though I never liked it, it was in good shape.) It was clear to us that it was going to be a long journey to get that smell of cat urine out of the house. That smell is forever burned into our minds. The urine was not only soaked into the carpet, but it soaked through the carpet to the linoleum and tile layers, all the way to the subfloor underneath the carpet. As we were removing all the layers of flooring and bagging it up for the garbage, Robert kept shaking his head and saying, “This is terrible…this is terrible.” My Dad later said, when I was relaying Robert’s reaction, “I would have said a bit more colorful words.”
Again, we were glad the carpet had already been removed in the living room, hallway, and bedrooms. As we were washing the hardwood under that carpet, we found many wet spots. When it came time to sand those hardwood floors, there were some spots that just brought back that urine smell. We were wondering if we would ever be able to get it in good enough shape for another tenant.
I won’t go into a whole lot of detail, but here’s a list of some highlights of our renovation project.
- Remove carpet
- Remove tile and linoleum
- Wash/Wash/Wash
- Scrub/Scrub/Scrub
- Prime every room with KILZ
- Strip finish off of wood floors
- Sand wood floors (takes forever!!)
- Replace flooring in kitchen and mudroom with new laminate flooring
- Paint all Rooms and trim
- 3 bedrooms, 1 ½ bath, kitchen, dining room, living room, & hallway
- Remove and re-panel dining room
- Refinish hardwood floors (got tired and running out of time, so had a friend help)
Over twenty gallons of paint later, more cleaning products than I care to remember, and a ton of elbow grease, we finally have a cute house ready for our new tenants. We made sure to have people with “untainted” noses to come in and smell the place to make sure we had done our job. To our delight, everyone that visited said they only smelled fresh paint and clean.
We have learned a great deal during this experience with our first tenant and feel things work out for a reason. Some folks may have been extremely angry about the condition and work that had to be done. We know that as landlords we should have done some things differently and we will on our next go around, but the timing was right in the switch over and we were able to do what we needed to do. Now, the project is DONE!!! Our new tenants moved in Friday and we are happy to focus our time on bigger and better things.
Click Play to see a slideshow of our saga.
Forgive our blurry photos, might have been the paint thinner & paint stripper fumes.
