Why dogs suck

I'll preface the rant that is about to follow by saying I don't have anything against dogs as a species, and I'm even known to turn into a giant, nauseating, baby-talking idiot around my mom's dogs. As a matter of fact, every once in a while in what can only be described as brief, scary separations from reality, I think about how cute dogs are and how maybe I should get a dog. For example, as soon as we knew we were going to be purchasing our new house I got to thinking about how the backyard is all fenced in, and oh how convenient that would be if we were to get a dog. Oh! Just let him out! Voila!

This delusional episode came to an abrupt end again (as it inevitably always does) last night around 10pm when Tom and I decided that we HAD to rip the carpet up in our bedroom before we moved any of our furniture in - because if we had ever seen a carpet as filthy as this one before, we had obviously blocked it completely from our memory in order to move forward with our lives. We had only rolled the first 1 or 2 feet of carpeting away from the wall before we noticed the alarming trend, which I have lovingly photographed so that everyone can share in the experience - because we're generous that way!

Mmmmm ... yummy. They're hard to capture on film, but those are pet urine stains, my friends. At least I hope it's only pet urine. So that we may all sleep well at night, let's not dwell on it.

Now I ask you to imagine, if you will, that you own some pets that are urinating regularly on your bedroom carpet. Such a practice will probably lend itself to some ... let's call them ... "aroma problems". At this point, you have several options:

1. Housetrain your pets. This requires the perseverance of the US Postal Service - neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow will keep you from making sure your furry little sack of bones empties their bladder outside ... every time.
2. Banish the pets to an easily cleanable room. If you simply do not want to put the effort into option #1 then maybe you have a room with a solid-surface floor - and as an extra-added bonus perhaps it even has a floor drain. Ideally it's a room, or a porch, that you don't need to use anyway, making it perfect for your little defecating companion(s). Put up a door, or one of those fancy little gates, and although you'll still need to be on clean-up duty it won't be in an area of your house you need to ... you know ... SLEEP IN.
   
3. Absolutely obscene amounts of PetFresh carpet deodorizer.

Guess which one our previous homeowner used?



That white layer of powdery film all over the carpet padding is an odoriferous mixture of probably 4 or 5 different "flavors" of powdered carpet deodorizer. And when you pull the carpet up, it all becomes airborne. The carpet padding, itself, is actually made up of very bright, neon specks of foam. It's the PetFresh that gives it that lovely pastel, grayed out tone. It doesn't even stop there, it eventually works its way all the way through the carpet padding down to the subfloor below, where it pools together in what looks like white, sandy beaches of deodorizing MAGIC. In our case, the subfloor below all this carpet and padding was the original hardwood floors. WHY they were ever covered up is another one of those 80s mysteries. After two more hours along the perimeter of the room with pry-bars and pliers, though, we managed to remove all the carpet tack strips and the staples used to hold the padding down. Thankfully the end result was well worth the effort. See for yourself.