What a nose wants...

You can have the sweetest house and the cutest decor, but if your carpet smells like cat pee, it's all over. 

When I am exhausted from the day and walking in the door I am capable of many things.  I can relax next to the overwhelming pile o' laundry.  I can ignore the dishes in the sink.  Dust on all the furniture can wait.  Nothing in the fridge?  A glass of water will do.  But I cannot, simply will not, most assuredly, do not stand stinky!

Candles take too long to catch up.  Plug-ins smell great, but for me they simply mix in with the smell du jour. Scented garbage bags?  Umm, a joke in my opinion.  The fan above the stove...not helping!  Commercial carpet cleaning solution works for stains but not smelly.

"Ahh, is that lilac, fresh linen and rotten banana peel?  Did you not take out the trash?"

And for my house with umpteen animals, an open box of baking soda is quite frankly a joke.  I do not have room to open a dresser-size-box-of-baking-soda to combat all the smelly that can happen within my walls.

I have a lot of animals, but I don't want a visitor's sense of smell to tell them that before they even are greeted by a cold, wet nose.  If I walk in dead tired and smell --insert stinky scent here--then it's up and at 'em to clean whatever the offending scent may be.

So having a litter box and three perfectly housebroken dogs under the age of two in my house has transformed me and my sensitive nose to be a smell expert.  Well, expert might be a stretch, but I have got the scent thing pretty much mastered. 

First stop on the stink war, vinegar.  Vinegar can do a thousand things...literally.  See?  But for me, the problem with vinegar is that well, it stinks!  And cleaning stinky with stinky is just not what this girl (or her nose) wants.  And cleaning with baking soda?  Not nearly as smelly as its vinegar counter part, but the two of them just don't have a great scent...

After many trials and errors my favorite cleaning solution is as follows:


Magic Solution:

• 1/2 cup of water **
  
• 1/2 cup of a really fantastic liquid soap
• 1 & 2/3 cups of baking soda
• 2 tablespoons of white vinegar.  (You must add the vinegar last because adding vinegar directly to the soap will cause the soap to be spoiled. And that my friend is another post entirely!)
• Then add your favorite essential oil until your nose is no longer offended.  (A couple of drops goes a very long way.)
• **Add as much water as you need to make this solution easily pour into a clean spray bottle and easily spray out.  It depends on what brands of items you buy so it can vary just a little.
  

This works.  It's cheap!  It's green.  It's not poisonous.  It won't leave a residue (making dust stick to whatever you are cleaning causing you to clean more...bad cycle...) 

And if your pet pees on carpet -

• Run like you are on a gameshow to get a rag or papertowels.
• Blot like crazy while you are scolding the tar out of them.
• Unscrew the bottle of your "Magic Solution"
• Saturate the area and leave it.

When it dries, you will not smell the urine. 

Ahhhhhhh! 

Smell that?

No?

Success smells sweet!