Help house smells!

[lisa270988]

It comes and goes its a horrible smell smells like the black rubbish bin! It hits you when you walk in the front door! It's driving me mad and getting me down

Could it be a dirty mop or wet cloth somewhere? Water under a floor?

I've had this twice. First culprit was a dead rat under floorboards (grim), second was a wet pair of socks in a forgotten backpack. You'd expect the first to be worst but they were pretty equal! Rat smell came and went (I think with temperature/humidity maybe) despite the rat categorically no longer coming and going.

How to You find the rat

There's nothing worse than an unidentified Smell, is there? We once had a dead mouse in the cavity wall that smelt like a dirty nappy (identified the smell from a MN post and dropped a mouse odour sachet down the cavity from the loft, but mice do dry out and stop smelling by themselves pretty quickly), and another time a rotten potato that had somehow found its way down the back of the cupboard that smelt utterly indescribable. Can you locate which room it's from? Other things to check are the drain in your fridge and the filter in your washing machine.

Check for rotten veg!

Oh god, the rotten potato smell is a whole level of gross in a way you do not expect plant matter smell. Smells like death but worse.

First time (old house)
Dead mouse had fallen into the condensation tray at the back of the fridge. And died. Yuk!

Second time (new house)
Dead rat in the roof insulation. Stank on and off for months when we first moved in to our current house. We didn't find the body until the we had the loft insulation changed. There was a lot of rat urine too that had soaked the old insulation which smelt horrible. Double yuk!

My dog was extra interested in some particular cracks, not hugely as she wasn't exactly a sniffer dog but observed her interest being caught in that area, pulled up a couple of boards and found a kind of nest made of shredded shopping bags, lots of fluff and the body pretty dried out by then. The previous owners had put down poison so it seemed it'd gone back to it's bed and died there. Once we cleaned it out the smell lingered lightly for maybe a week (I was very stressed by this!) but then went forever.

I was driving myself insane looking for the source of the horrific smell in our house.

I eventually found a screwed up coat that had fallen down which my DD had been wearing to work helping at a farm.

It had calf scour (vomit) on it. One of the worst smells ever.

🤮🤮

She was lucky I didn't burn it!! It went in the outside dog washing machine!!!

I had this with a dead mouse under the floorboards. Awful smell. Had to take up part of floor to get at it.