TPFH's Journal: Cats, Alergies and Filters for the Furnace

I have a delema. Well, hopefully not much.

My house is settup like a duplex, I rent out half, and live in the other half. I have a couple of housemates that I really need to help me pay the mortgage, and they are good housemates. The issue is that they want to adopt a kitten, and I have severe alergies. In the winter the heating system will circulate the air between our respective portions of the house.

My last housemate before them had a cat. She lived in the house before I purchased it so I didn't want to kick her out or tell her the cat has to go. I did OK, and in fact my allergies lessed a bit, but it still did have an impact on my health.

The question: I've been meaning to get a filter for the heating system anyway, and they seem to be a lot cleaner than my last housemate. Should this be enough that I'll be OK with a cat?

Another issue is that dispite my alergies I really do like cats and like the idea of a feline companion protecting the house from both physical and spiritual vermin.

I think I've decided to let them have a kitten, but I wanted to see if anyone had any more information that would be helpful.

filters

[SolemnDragon]

Get filters. Put them in the air ducts. And see about getting your side of the house an air purifier (by which i'm talking HEPA, not one o'them ozone-producing ionising junk-science metal plate gizmos.) Remember it's not the hair that you're allergic to, but the protein in cat spit, and it's a sticky chemical that will get one everything, including the walls and ceiling, once it's airborne. It will be on their clothing, their stuff, and every surface in the apartment. In other words, the basement and any ot

You can rig up

[buffer-overflowed]

A quick room filter with a standard fan for your bedroom. It's kinda ghetto, but it works and it's cheap.

Also so long as they are clean about it, your allergies should be mitigated to a certain extent. I'm horribly allergic to cats but so long as people I visit who have them are reasonably clean I generally do ok. Try to get them to use a vacuum with a decent HEPA filter on it to prevent the dander from getting up into the air. Stuff like that. If they're reasonable people they'll understand that you'

Some other ideas

[elmegil]

Request that they regularly (like weekly) brush the cat and give it a good rinse with this stuff [allerpet.com]. We haven't used it on our cats in a while, but when we did, friends with allergies would come over and be surprised at how little they were affected by our two cats (which isn't to say it was a magic bullet, but it definitely mitigated things). Main reason we don't do it now is lack of time and motivation--having a toddler tends to break down how anal you are about other cleaning activities :-).