Back when he was a contractor, David Hoyt (now of Seacoast Floor Supply in South Hampton, N.H.), had a customer call he’ll never forget. He had spent three days sanding and refinishing an entire house with 12-inch-square parquet tiles. At the end of the third day, he put on his final coat of poly and left, only to get a call from the homeowner around 7:30 that night. She said her cat was lying on the wood floor, and when she hit the can opener—a sure technique to call him—he barely moved and didn’t get up. As it turns out, the cat had curled up and taken a nap on his favorite spot on the wood floor while the finish was still tacky. When the feline awoke hours later, he was adhered to the finish. The homeowner asked Hoyt what to do, and he suggested taking a plastic spatula to try to lightly scoop the cat up. Fortunately, that did the trick. “I think a normal cat would have gotten out of it, but this was a fat cat, probably 25 pounds—just a huge ball with little tiny legs,” Hoyt recalls. He returned the next day to refinish the area. “It was a perfect floor for it to happen on, because it was the parquet tiles, so I just taped it off and refinished it.”
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