Our dear, depart cat, Harvey had a UTI a year or so ago, and managed to piss on my dresser. I store clothes in the bottom drawer that I don’t wear often. No cat piss smell in the room. Anyway, I pulled out a nice grey North Face sweatshirt last night and discovered a stain. I’ve washed it in hot water with plenty of detergent, but the stain is still there. I’ve covered the stain with Dawn dishwashing soap, rubbed in with some water, and have it in a plastic bag to ‘soak’ overnight.
Is there any hope of getting the stain out? Oxy-Clean? (Is that available in stores?) Wisk? (Dad used it on his shirts back in the '70s when ‘greasy kid’s stuff’ was still in use, to remove ‘ring around the collar’.) Something else?
Oxy-clean has worked well for me on stains of biological nature that were quite old. Take the powder and make a paste then let sit for a long time, or soak the whole thing for a long time (soaking will ensure that if the garment fades a little it will do so evenly; I only had something fade once so it’s not too likely.) I had a plant stain on some jeans that had been washed and dried several times, and after soaking in oxy-clean for a few hours I washed in the machine and the stain vanished. Surprised the heck out of me. Give it a try.
ETA it’s available at Target and Walmart among other places.
I was building a walk’in closet off the bed room I piled all my clothes on hangers in another room ontop of other boxes of stuff…then acquired 3 cats from someone in the mean time…
Guess where they thought the litter box was?
Even though I had 2 concrete mixing pans full of litter on both sides of the house.
By the time I noticed it…
The only clothes I have left are the ones that were in the hamper and baskets.
My sister’s cat, who had been neutered, still managed to work of the energy to spray – fairly high up on the wall, where he hit an 80 year old oil painting, one of our family’s treasured art heirlooms. Fortunately, we got there fast and daubed up the pee. But how do we know the chemical changes won’t result in bleaching or staining, maybe ten or twenty years from now?
It might be a little late for this, but an enzymatic cleaner made to clean up pet urine might help. I use “Unique” brand, but there are a lot of them out there. If it’s just a stain and there’s no stink, that might not be necessary.
I’ve been able to get some pretty bad stains out with OxyClean. You can get it in stores nowadays, and if you use it, you’ll want to dissolve it in hot water before you add detergent and put the sweatshirt in.
So the first thing that came to mind when reading the topic was the (in)famous “Pickle Surprise!” (Feauturing, and I wasn’t aware of this until just now, RuPaul!)
Anyway, is this a stain or did the cat pee effectively “bleach” the fabric? I ask only because I remember a “stain” in the corner of the dining room of my parents’ house from when I was a kid–we had (IIRC) horrid brown carpet, and there was this stain right next to the hi-fi from cat pee. But it wasn’t really a stain as such–rather, it was a spot where the carpet was bleached to a sort of orange (also horrid) by the cat pee. If that’s what’s happened, you’re SOL, I expect, short of bleaching and redying the whole thing.
First: Washing the Dawn-treated sweatshirt in Oxy-Clean didn’t work. So the SO soaked it in Oxy-Clean for several hours and washed in in Oxy-Clean. There were still some yellow spots. So I washed it with Oxy-Clean and bleach. There are still a few yellow spots on it. Now that I think of it, and looking at the pattern, those might be ancient coffee dribbles.
Keep it for dirty chores or whatnot 