Basement Landing- Rip up that Carpet!!

One of the things that we swore we would not do when we bought a house was have half finished projects that sit around forever. However, we have realized that this is going to happen no matter what because of the cost of updates, and the fact we have animals. To be more specific in this case, we have a Snickers... 

...and Snickers has separation anxiety that shows itself through accidents. On top of that, she has favorite spots to have her accidents, and while we could have her crated throughout the day to prevent said accidents, Nico cannot be crated because there isn't a crate he can't escape. This is a problem because he might freak out that she is crated and he isn't and go all Hulk on us. But I digress. 

Snickers has her favorite accident spots. She LOVES to have accidents down on the basement landing, probably because that is the furthest she can get from where she spends most of her time. However, not only was this causing some serious stains due to her neon yellow pee, it stunk. No matter how much cleaner I used, I was feeling like you could smell it anywhere in the house. So we decided it was time to rip it up....

Look at all those LOVELY yellow stains! I promise, we did clean them with a cleaner after they happened, Snickers just has super staining pee. Go figure. 

So I ripped up the carpet and the pad. Some things we found were not a surprise. Like the dirt. That was not a surprise. However, we were surprised that the concrete had been sealed by the builders before the carpet got put down. YAY! However, we were still going to seal it ourselves with the smell blocking stuff after using the enzyme cleaner. But first, we had to rip up the carpet tack. I was expecting that to be really hard to do since it was in concrete, but it wasn't. The downside is that there are now dents in the concrete from it coming up with the tacking strips. 

So the tacking got pulled up and we scrubbed the floor down with the enzyme cleaner and got to sealing. We put two coats of the sealer down and called it good. We then found that just because it was sealer doesn't mean it doesn't stain. So we cleaned again, painted over the stains and then used a polyurethane coat on top of the sealer. Although the sealer says it is "clear drying" the sealed floor now has a yellow tint. However, this is a temporary solution and the polyurethane coat means that we should have quick and easy clean up for any more of Snickers' accidents downstairs. Once we have the deck we'll look into tiling the landing into the laundry room so that it has a nice finished look. But for now, we'll take the not as nice look, but no longer smelly sealed concrete look.