Well the bean bag curse continues. After ordering two and having to bring one bag back to Walmart for being half filled, the remaining bean bag has taken some abuse.
I was standing in the sensory room looking at Noel who started doing a scratching motion like she was in the litter box. To my horror I saw a very deep puddle on the bean bag as she walked away! It went right through to the floor. Great! How the bloody H*ll am I so supposed to clean a ginormous bean bag. Oh, I know, I'll just throw it in my industrial size washer and dryer. It will totally fit and the dryer won't melt the stuffing and all will be right in my Universe. Meanwhile, back in the real world....All my germ sensors went off and I just wanted to clean it, RIGHT NOW!!
I called my friend Jenn who has 4 kitties (used to have 5 but one poor little kitty fell ill this year and is now in kitty heaven) and has a cat that has potty issues to see if she could give me any advice on cleaning the bean bag. Needless to say, she had no experience with kitty pee on ginormous bean bags so I just bounced ideas off her and tried to come up with some different solutions. I wasn't about to throw the whole thing away. But it would be too expensive to refill it with the same kind of stuffing.
Long story short, I put it out on the porch until I could decide what to do. Stephen came home from school and we needed to go pick up Olivia at school. She stays after on Mondays to do all her homework for the week. It used to take her an hour to an hour and a half a day at home. This works much better for her. Once my husband got home I decided to deal with the bean bag. Poor Stephen, who is already attached to the bean bag, kept taking us to the window and pointing to it. This just broke my heart and I wanted to clean the darn thing and get it back in some kind of working order ASAP!
I ended up dumping all the stuffing into 1 giant black trash bag and 4 regular size bags. My porch looked like a frat house after a party of jock bean bags drank too much and threw up all over it : ( I would have taken pictures to share with you all but the magnitude of the mess was completely distressing not to mention the smell of cat pee and I just wanted to be done with the whole ordeal as quickly as possible. Thank you Jesus for my wet/dry vac : ) That thing has come to my rescue so many times in the couple of weeks I have owned it. If you are completely freaked out by giant dry spills or any other dry mess that would kill your vacuum I highly recommend you purchase one.
So the cover went into the wash with about 1/4 of a bottle of Shout stain remover and a full cap of Tide. I washed it again with 1/2 a cup of Tide after the first washing. I stuffed the cover with all our throw blankets. We have about 20. We love our throw blankets ; ) It is limp and squishy, a mere shadow of its once firm and puffy form. Just another manic Monday!
Guess who slept nestled behind my legs last night....Noel.
3 comments:
Ugh. No idea how to get cat pee out of bean bags. I had a cat who used to enjoy peeing on my curtains. He found another home.
Yikes! What exactly is the inside made of (the 'beans')? Try calling the manufacturer, maybe they have some idea on how to clean the beans?
I have no clue about cats... my mom is deathly allergic to them so I've never spent much time with them.
Good luck, let us know what you figure out!
I actually think that Noel was doing us a favor in forcing us to throw away the "beans" (styrofoam beads and foam scraps). The bean bag had a spray paint smell and when I dumped the filling it was clear that the smell was from that and not the cover. I'm sure anything that gives off that kind of smell can't be too healthy to be around. I'm hoping to find a cheap, safer and easier to clean filling. The kids and the cats (Noel hasn't peed on it since I cleaned it) absolutely love it and are on it every chance they get.
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