The “Cat Pee House” is going viral on TikTok—here’s why. You read that right.
In a series of nine videos with more than 6.7 million views total (the most popular video has 4.8 million views on its own), Hannah (@it_is_hannah_banana) explains how she accidentally ended up in a cat urine-soaked house.
“Wouldn’t you smell that right away?” you might ask. Apparently not.
“My beautiful first house became my worst nightmare,” Hannah wrote in the caption of her first clip.
How did Hannah discover the secret beneath the floorboards?
Turns out, Hannah rented the house for a year for herself and her two teenage boys after getting divorced. It was a great price and was close to her parents, so it seemed like a perfect fit. The owners did prohibit animals in the home since they’d previously had a “pet problem,” but never went into specifics.
Turns out those details would have been good to know.
When she first moved in, Hannah and her boys couldn’t smell that anything was off. After a few months, she started to get a few whiffs of a faint cat pee smell, especially when the HVAC was on, but she chalked it up to the house being a century old.
It wasn’t until Hannah bought the house and brought her cat Bella with her that she realized this was a more severe problem than she could have ever imagined.
Bella, the cat, noticed the pee stains throughout the house, which Hannah originally thought were just water stains.
When Hannah further investigated, getting down on the floor and giving it a good whiff, she found that it “smelled like 50 cats had peed in this area.” It couldn’t have been Bella because she was rarely allowed in that part of the house.
That’s when Hannah started putting the pieces together.
“I bet that the previous owner of this house, the pet problem was probably that she had a lot of cats,” she theorized.
In a comment, Hannah said that the house was flipped, and the lacquer and paint on the walls and ozone treatments had temporarily taken down the smell.
The history of the “cat pee house”
As for the previous tenant who caused the issue, Hannah explained what happened in a comment. “Sadly, the woman who had all the cats was addicted to crack and died of an OD at a local gas station. A neighbor told me the story,” she wrote. “The cats were left in the house for a while. All around, it’s sad.” In another comment she specified that there were 17 cats.
Needing reinforcements to address the issue, Hannah called her dad and told him she needed him to help rip up and replace some floorboards. She estimated it would cost her a few hundred bucks.
Hannah and her dad were immediately taken aback by the smell that assaulted them when dad ripped up a baseboard and had to grab N95 masks, which didn’t mitigate the smell. “It was disgusting,” she says.
At first, Hannah thought the issue was just in her room, so she moved all of her stuff into one of her son’s rooms while replacing the bedroom floor.
But the house turned out to be much more cat-astrophic.
A persistent cat pee problem
As she walked through the house, Hannah realized the problem was virtually everywhere.
“I lost it emotionally when I realized that we were probably gonna have to tear apart the whole house,” Hannah says, showing a video of herself crying.
Here’s how you know the issue was really bad: It’s a two story house and the pee from the top floor soaked all the way down to the ceiling of the first floor. That’s a whole lotta cat pee.
Deeming the house unlivable, Hannah packed herself and her two kids up and moved into her parent’s house while she how the cat pee saga sorted.
A construction company came in and sprayed and sealed the wood all around the house to disinfect and neutralize the smell and to save money, Hannah and her family decided to do the floor and finishing work themselves.
Hannah is in the midst of posting more storytime updates, but judging by this video, it seems that after 10 months, Hannah was able to move back in with her kids.
@it_is_hannah_banana The story of how cat pee destroyed my house #cats #house #catpeehouse ♬ Beethoven Moonlight Sonata-High Sound Quality – Amemiya
Is the problem really cat pee?
Now, some people in the comments section don’t think the problem is cat pee at all.
“Lol again, this is not a cat pee house. This is a mold house. Mold smells like cat pee. That’s why you can see it up the walls. Run an ERMI and this house would fail miserably,” a commenter wrote. Mold specialists have stated that mold, especially black mold, smells like cat pee.
Commenters have also offered other suggestions, some more legal than others.
“Did you ever think of accidentally leaving a curling iron on near a curtain??” a person said.
“Do you have any recourse with the sellers for this?” another asked.
The Daily Dot reached out to Hannah for comment via TikTok message and comment.
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