odd smell in house

[surreysnapper]

It smells a bit like damp stale flannel iyswim?

from what I can tell, we don't have a damp issue.

We do have cats though...... soooooo, rotting early Xmas pressie from one of them perhaps?

Surely its the smell of the cats. Owners are usually oblivious to the pong.

nope, not the smell of cats at Al.... this is distinctly different

Washing machine needing a clean?

Open your windows when the heating is on just for 15 mins.

Do you open your windows every day?

yes, open windows daily.. who doesn't?

washing machine may be the culprit..... im going in......

Mice ? We are always getting the bloody things especially when it gets cold and the first sign is a damp mouldy musty smell

Many people don’t open their windows!

Do you have a tumblr dryer? Empty the water.

Do you have a mop that's gone fusty?

We had a terrible smell in a shared flat many years ago. We all blamed one flatmate's socks left on the floor but after they were removed and washed (some time later) the smell continued to get worse. It turned out to be a dead mouse under the floor boards.

Check the drainage reservoir on the back of your fridge, they can harbour some terrible pongs.

ChristineBaskets Ha you beat me to it - we recently spilt a pot of cream in our fridge and thought we'd cleaned it all up. A few days later a smell started and got progressively worse and worse and after several fruitless days of searching we decided to pull the fridge out to look for dead things (we have cats...) and there was a lump of something cheesy sitting in the drainage reservoir absolutely stinking which we then worked out was some of the spilt cream that must have gone down the drainage pipe. The heat from the motor had turned it into stinky cheese effectively...

The only time I experienced a still inexplicable smell of stale wet towel in my house was when I turned out to be in early pregnancy...

Ugh yes Big some spilt milk had turned to jelly in the reservoir before I found it. The relief at locating the source of the stink was immense though!

I am a window opener, even in the depths of winter I open the windows, dh gets the rage, we arent paying to heat the streets you know! I hate recycled air.

Clothes that have been left in the washing machine a day or so tend to smell like that even when they're dried in a tumble dryer

Might it be some sort of sneaky rotten vegetable, hiding among non rotten veg?

Rotten potato and rotten cauliflower have quite an odour.