So far the biggest challenge with my house has been keeping the cats out of my front yard. There are many cats in the neighborhood which I suspect are people’s pets and they just love going under my front porch to do their business. Apparently, my front porch area has been the neighborhood litter box for the past couple of years. This is going to be hard to break.
First, we removed the old porch covering and replaced it with some nice trellis. It looks so much better. Letting it air out a little bit definitely helped the smell, but that horrible odor lingers. I tried using baking soda and then a heavy dowsing of vinegar, but I just can’t seem to get rid of the cat smell.
At first I thought if I just cleaned it out real good and bleached the area to get rid of the smell, they would stop coming back, but of course that didn’t work. I then laid down a bunch of mulch and some plants hoping that this would deter them, but they just started using the mulch as their litter box. So then I filled the mulch with spiky gumballs thinking they wouldn’t want to dig, but they found their way around those too. I tried two different types of cat repellent and neither seemed to deter them. I’ve tried placing rocks and other items in the way as well as sprinkling everything with a heavy layer of chili powder. Alas, I’m losing this battle against the cats. They just love pooping by my front porch.
I’m going to try using coffee grounds and if this doesn’t work I might have to resort to closing the area with chicken wire or getting a motion activated sprinkler. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that. Wish me luck on keeping those pesky cats out of my yard.
