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The house smelled bad.  You didn't have to see the "A Home without Cats is Not a Home" pillow to understand why.  The first floor's catty stench reached out onto the front stoop and knocked you back one step before you even hit the second cement stair, but the first floor wasn't the worst.  The worst was the basement, where the litter boxes were kept.  For a while, litter boxes were not cleaned out, but new boxes were added.  The basement reeked.  No one could stay in it for long and some even turned around on the stairs to flee.  If you made it out and traveled to the second floor with the bedrooms, you might actually think it didn't smell up there at all.  But it did.  The house and all its contents smelled like cat: cat fur, cat urine, cat poop, cat vomit and, yes, even dead cat.