Mystery smell thread....please help!

[FortunesFave]

Every morning when I enter my dining room/office, there's a smell which I can only describe as 'pissy'

We have wooden floors and one small rug....there's nothing on the floor or the rug. No spills or wee.

We have one small dog who sleeps in DD's room. She has only weed in the house once and then in the bathroom...it's not her...there's no damp patch anywhere. There's barely any furniture in the dining room...only my desk and chair, one armchair (small) and a table and two chairs.

The floors, being hard are easy to check for a wee...and there's nothing there at all!

The curtains...I've smelled them all over...every inch...washed them too just in case...but the smell is there each morning.

It seems to fade quickly but I'm worried it's just me getting used to it!

The smell is not in any other room. I've smelled around the open fireplace incase there's something in there but nothing.

This is an old house (Australian old...so not really old) it was built (badly) in the 1920s and is more of a wooden shack really.

It has been clad in fake bricks during the 70s but the point I'm making is it's rickety and in bad condition. Could the smell be seeping up through the floorboards from beneath? I can't access the underneath of the house but there is a space there.

rotten plastic can give off a bad fishy smell or smell a bit like wee.
I was once cursed with a light fitting that had gone “off” and the smell of wee appearing at weird times, took years to find the problem. We once redecorated, went to change the light and BAM the stink was revealed! As it was made worse when the light was on, it was so hard to trace.
Maybe there is a timer, or clock or something? Or it’s left over from the light being on the previous night?

Plant?

Sensible hmm....there's actually no light fitting in the room...the one we had got broken before corona and we've not been able to find time or an open shop to fix that issue. The odd thing about this room is that there's no electrical sockets in it at all...just a ceiling fitting. I suspect when it was built that it was expensive to add sockets and they missed this one out...we're semi rural and people lived in a very old fashioned way for a long time here...there's no mains gas for example.

I'll look about now to see if there's any other plastic in the room though.

Fruity one plant in the room...no smell coming from it.

Could be a bit of damp or lack of fresh air in the morning. I hate this. Since lockdown I can smell cigarette smoke, like its coming in the window but its 24 hours a day. So annoying.

See, the smell has gone now....it started about 3 weeks ago. So it wouldn't be an animal rotting underneath the floor as surely that would have faded by this point?

Jam I did wonder that...we don't have central heating here (who does in Oz!?) and I wondered if, since it's Autumn now, the dampness is seeping in. It's quite a damp house in general.

Could be a bit of damp or lack of fresh air in the morning

I noticed a smell of stale cigarette smoke in our hallway and couldn’t locate it. It went on for about a week at the start of lockdown, and then DH located the source. He’d left his damp swimming kit in his sports bag and it had been there for THREE WEEKS because he’d forgotten to wash it.

I was googling divorce lawyers.

That plastic ceiling fitting was my culprit though!!!!

Have you painted it recently? Some paints can smell pissy.

You say it's an old house....could it have some kind of fire proofing or insulation? I only ask because I wear a regulation waterproof/fireproof cost for work and it smells like strong pee. But you quickly become accustomed to the smell.

I'm probably wrong but it was the first thing I thought of. I remember for the first 3 weeks of my job I went around sniffing my entire communal office to try and find the smell

A pissy smell is supposed to be a rat smell. Have you noticed any droppings anywhere?

Could you have a mouse? When I had mice I could smell wee in the kitchen each morning. It kinds smelled like dog wee.

Apparently termites have a kind of musty smell.

An ammonia smell is often associated with certain types of mould. If you've got damp, might well be that. Good ventilation and bleach might help?

Have you painted fairly recently? There is a brand of paint that people are complaining about as it smells of cat piss.

Could it be possum wee in your roof space? My neighbour in a post war beach house had this problem. I’m in WA.

I’d think that is coming from the subterranean space under your floorboards - likely an animal nesting, pooing/urinating, or decomposing. If it doesn’t go away naturally within a few months you might need to investigate further by pulling up the floorboards.

Have you painted it with Valspar?

I was thinking valspar too.

under the floor boards is my guess

Is the room near the bathroom? Could there be a leak and you notice the small more in the dining room/office?

I'd be removing particular items overnight to store elsewhere, to see if you then have a morning with no smell. IE remove the rug one night, any different?, if not put it back and remove the first chair, any different?, and so on.

Mice

Did you take the kids lunchboxes out of their bags when schools shut in March?

Otherwise I'd guess mice. They pee as they wander around as opposed to doing it in one place.