Strong pet Odor please help

[Howard Swede]

We are flipping a hoarder house that had several dogs that never went outside to go to bathroom. We ripped out all the carpet and wood floors, remove some sub floor, treated all areas with oil based Kilz. Utilized an ozone machine and the home still has a pet odor after installing new carpet, new LVP, fresh Paint, and updates. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[JD Martin]

You should not have installed carpet or finished flooring until the smell was gone. Possibilities:

1. You did not completely remediate issues in the subfloor. That's going to be virtually impossible to address with finished flooring down. If you could not remove all affected wood in the subfloor - sometimes not possible, if strong urine/fecal matter made it to joists - you should have sealed everything which could have been done in several ways - polyurethane everything; poly vapor barrier; painting & 1/4" subfloor on top of old floor; etc.

2. Smell got into walls, baseboards & drywall from urination. That usually requires cutting out lower half of drywall and possibly replacing insulation, at least lower half, and possibly baseboards. That's usually not possible to cover with paint because the smell will waft around the baseboard area.

3. There is residual smell in the heating ducts. Might be able to have ductwork cleaned and sanitized.

It can be done. Years ago I bought a house I still recall as the "cat piss house" where the smell was so strong you almost couldn't enter the home. I thought we would have to tear out all the original hardwood floors - you can't even imagine the smell when the flooring sanders started sanding it - but once we got the top layer of urine sanded off and the floors resealed & repoly'd the smell was gone.