It’s springtime! The season when lots of homes go on the market. I found this interesting article by New York Times real estate writer Tim McKeough a few weeks ago about what to do with your litter box when your house is on the market and you have prospective buyers coming through. Whether they like or have cats is not the issue – a litter box in the middle of a beautiful bathroom, for example, is going to impact someone’s opinion of the house. It just is.
Boy can I relate to this problem! Due to my husband’s job we’ve moved three times in the last four years and bought and sold homes twice. Each time, I’m in a quandary about what to do with the cats – and their litter boxes – when buyers come through.
With the cats, we would simply pack them up in their carriers and drive around when there were showings. Poor babies. But that was better than the possibility of some buyer leaving the door open a crack and letting my indoor cats out into the great big world. Shudder.
Anyway, we ended up rounding up all the boxes and taking them to the garage when we had a showing.
This article offers some lovely solutions – from subtle places to hide the litter box to beautifully designed boxes themselves. Check out the ModKat Litter Box 
Source: Amazon.com
Have any of you had to find a way to hide or alter your litter box during house showings? What did you do with your cats?
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The cats and I actually move out and go stay with someone else for a few days. Between the shedding and the kitty litter, it’s really hard to keep the place clean to impress potential future owners.
In Green Bay, WI – most of the brokers will tell you to get them out of the house and leave no visible signs of a cat in the house – because some people are highly allergic to can dander, and you could lose a prospective buyer if there is any sign of a cat living there. Myself, I think that is a little extreme, but if your house doesn’t sell, then I’d certainly try that as a last measure.
We’ve only had to do this once, but for scheduled showings, we’d check the cats into a kitty spa for the day and ditch the litter boxes in an outdoor shed, hiding them under bags of mulch. It may seem expensive, but the risk on having your home on the market too long and having to take a big price reduction is too great. We scheduled the hard core professional cleaners (not just the maid service, but the ones who specialize in pre- and post-move cleanups) twice a month (with regular cleanings in between) to ensure that the maximum amount of cat hair and cat smell was removed. At the time, all of our cats were indoor-outdoor, so we didn’t have to be as concerned about realtors / prospective buyers letting them out.
Now, with one cat who’s indoor-only, I would stick him in his KatKabin in the garage, or we’d drive him around (although for full-day open houses, we’d check him into the kitty spa.) All litter boxes would be thoroughly hidden.
This reminds me of one time when we rented, and the owners put the home up for sale. What a pain. Having the house shown is no fun if you don’t have any skin in the game. Then we actually brought in an extra litter box, got it filled up with pee and poop, put it in the smallest bathroom and kept the door closed until showings so that a giant cloud of litter box smell exploded from the room when the door was opened. We also left rat traps around for good measure. Worked like a charm. (Although, the amount the owners were asking was totally unrealistic.) It left us with plenty of time to find another house in the same area. Not that I recommend this strategy to cat-owning renters….
We sold our house last summer and it was on the market for a good 8 months. We stipulated that we needed a heads up on all showings (no “pop ins” while we were at work, etc). We had a fruit cellar type room in the basement about the size of a small bedroom. It had a door. So we made this room the Kitty Camp room. All their favorite beds, heated beds, food, water, chairs, levels, toys. All their favorite stuff. We left just the necessities upstairs day to day. (1 box, food, minimal toys).
When we’d have a showing we would power clean the whole place tip to tail, gather up EVERY scrap of remaining cat stuff in the house, and take all 4 cats downstairs to their Kitty Camp in the basement. We put a note on the door saying “Kitty Day Care, please do not open
”. And we put nice big photos of what the room looked like on the door, so people knew there were shelves and lots of storage in there. That seemed to work!
Many of the showings were during the day so we didnt have the luxury to pack them all up and drive around. We had to go to work. We’d put them in the Kitty Camp room before work, and we’d come let them out at lunch after the showing, etc. Plus my cats poop in the car. I’d rather do ANYTHING than put them in the car 4 times a week!
We have eight. When the time comes, we will have no choice but to board them. The goal would be to work with a realtor who “get it,” so that there are no surprise visits, ever. Surprise visits would destroy our chances of selling. Even though we keep the house really clean, multiple cats is just too much of a turn off for a lot of people.
Of course, by the time we are ready to sell and move (another five years, I predict,) we will probably be down to six–still a lot!
So our solution would be: Board the cats, hide the boxes.