Is the idea of clawed carpets or broken blinds enough to make you start sweating? You might be a renter! And have pets.
With over a third of Americans currently renting their homes, it’s important to know how to handle the messes that come with cats and the damage claws can cause if your furry friends aren’t properly trained. To help your lease be a happy one on the pet front, we’ve put together four major problems most cat-owners may experience during their rental life – and how to handle them.
Problem #1: Scratching Everywhere But Where You Want
This is one of the most common problems you’ll run into when you’re trying to take care of a rental property with kitties at home – especially if space is limited and you don’t have as many scratching posts as you’d like! Or if your cats are perverse little brats who don’t wanna use the nice expensive posts you bought when there’s a perfectly good carpet on the floor. (Not naming any Dany names, but…) Oh, and if your home has textured wallpaper? Hold on to your patience: you’re going to need it!
The best way to handle this is to have enough sturdy scratching posts that are tall enough or long enough for your cats to comfortably use – as a guide for how to gauge this, the ideal scratching post is taller than your cat can stretch. If space is limited, place the scratching posts or pads in the areas your kitty insists on shredding with their claws. (Get more great guidelines from this post on PetCentral.
Need extra help? You’ll need to employ some training techniques – use treat/clicker training to positively reinforce scratching post use! And check our post dedicated to how to stop scratching problems.
Problem #2: Broken Blind Syndrome
Next time you’re driving through an apartment complex, play a little game: look for the windows with destroyed blinds and you’ll know where all the cats live. Of course, you probably already know that – I learned it very quickly after renting my first place with a tiny Tiger Jack who moved like greased lightning and thought the blinds a noisy toy just for him – that also revealed the Kitty TV (you may know this as the “window”)!
There are a couple of ways you can fight Broken Blind Syndrome. If you have a cat tree, try setting it up next to the window and opening the blinds during the day. You can also lift the blinds just enough for your cat to have a ledge to lounge on and daily access to Kitty TV. If you want to train them away from the ledge completely, you can use double-sided tape or nubby plastic on the windowsills to train them not to jump up in the window – generally, cats don’t like the feel of sticky stuff under their paws. There are even more great ideas on how to handle this common problem at blinds.com.
If you’ve tried everything and your little ball of furious fluff just won’t leave the blinds alone? Great news! You can replace the standard aluminum blinds you find in most apartments pretty cheaply.
Problem #3: Hairballs and Vomit and Diarrhea, Oh My!
Cats are genetically engineered to ruin carpets. Not, like, on purpose or anything. It’s just that cats groom and then produce hairballs which come up as a fetid mass in bile soup on your carpet. (Never on the tile, am I right?) Then if your feline friend is an overeater or eats too quickly one morning, you might end up with that random pool of vomit you will inevitably step in. Or, if you have a long-haired cat, you may find yourself dealing with a litter box malfunction and wet poo dragged across your carpets. (Tiger Jack again. Poor buddy.)
How the hell are you supposed to keep your carpets clean – clean enough to get your security deposit back – in the face of all of that? First off, if you have pets, you are probably never going to see your security deposit again. Sorry. The next step is getting familiar with pet-safe cleaning products: you’ll want to keep both deodorizing carpet cleaners and enzymatic cleaners on hand. Make sure you learn how to clean a hairball (or vomit or poo) correctly. You may also consider it a worthwhile expense to have your carpets professionally cleaned regularly.
Not resolved to frequent extensive cleaning? See about getting a number of cheap area rugs; they can add color to a room and somewhat protect installed carpets as well.
Problem #4: Litter Box Woes
Are you worried about your cats tracking litter all over your apartment? Like little Ani from that desert planet said, litter dust is coarse and gets everywhere and can be incredibly irritating to keep cleaned up. Or perhaps you have a more serious problem and your cat is peeing outside the litter box in your rental home? That’s obviously a huge problem behaviorally and no good for the apartment. Cat urine is pungent enough to be weaponized!
For the litter dust problem, you could try using a mat outside the box – of course, your fine feline friends may thumb their noses at you by jumping over them. My cats do. (And yes, fine, they don’t have thumbs! The idiom stands.) You could also try vacuuming every day. Or you could switch to a litter that doesn’t involve irritating dust, whether through wood pellets or washable granules. Changing your litter may also correct issues with your kitty peeing outside the litter box! (It’s always best to stick with the litter most comfortable for your cat.)
When it comes to cleaning up cat urine, it’s important to be thorough and not miss any spots since this odor will invite your cat to pee there again. Using an enzymatic cleaner here is gold, and you may also want to use a blacklight and some tape to identify problem areas so you don’t miss any.
What’s the biggest problem you’ve had when it comes to your cats and your rental home? Sound off in the comments, and tell us how you solved the issue!
