After several of our guests got sick with an upper respiratory virus, we decided it was time for a major cleaning.
We’re already very dedicated to cleaning at the cats-only boarding facility. The condos are cleaned as soon as a guest leaves, and at least once per week if they sit empty. The floors are swept and mopped twice per day. The playroom and exam room are sanitized after each cat is inside.
But after four cats came down with a kind of cold, we didn’t want to chance other guests catching the same runny nose, runny eyes, and sneezing. So we went a little cleaning crazy.
My coworker S. and I came up with a list of all the things we could possibly clean and posted it. As luck would have it, we were down to less than ten guests at the boarding facility after the outbreak — so we had plenty of time to care for them and tackle the great big cleaning project list.
The first thing we did was take all the doors off the condos. In the isolation wards, the condos have only one door; in the main room, the condos have two doors. We filled buckets with a mixture of soap and our vet-grade sanitizer and grabbed scrub brushes. (Okay, one bucket was the large one that we use for mopping and the other was an extra-large litter pan.) S. scrubbed the doors in the isolation wards and I tackled the doors in the main boarding room. Over a two day period, we scrubbed seventy-six doors and the interiors of forty-six condos. (We moved the few guests we did have to clean condos while we worked, in order to get all the condos done.)
The floors, walls, and all hard surfaces were scrubbed down with the same cleaning mixture. Coworker K. got out the ladder and cleaned the storage cubbies above the condos. We ran all the plastic storage bins through the dishwasher.
We haven’t had any cats come down with the sniffles since patient zero and the other three cats. And we all agreed that the major cleaning effort was a good stress-buster!