My house smells so horrible I'm considering moving

[JacqueslePeacock]

Please help - you're my last resort! My house smells disgusting and I have no idea what it is. I live in a Victorian terrace which we bought 2 years ago. The smell is worst in the hallway but is also pretty bad in the sitting room, just off the hall. I struggle to describe the stench, but it reminds me of some kind of stinky dried mushrooms, or perhaps just really horrible ingrained dirt.

I've had the carpets cleaned professionally - no improvement. I've had a damp company come in with their damp-o-meter - no damp. I've pulled up part of the carpet in the hall, but it's just clean, bare floorboards underneath. What the hell can it be?? We've just come home from 2 days away and the house has been shut up, and the smell is so overpowering that I've told DH we'll have to move.

ours did not smell of sewage, sorry!

A dead animal Would be choc full of flies . It's definately not that...

Trying to imagine your hall - what is under your stairs? We have an under stairs cupboard (dumping ground) which is original. In which there is a hatch to access the subfloor. I think this is fairly common in period properties so would be worth trying to find before taking up a floor board. The understairs void would be prime suspect for something smelly to be hidden. Good luck

I would definitely be looking under the floorboards. Are the walls in the area sound? Any damage?

Two rooms smelled very unpleasant when I moved into my house, hard to describe, but like a hamster cage.

I got the rooms re-plastered and the smell instantly went.

Or it could be the carpet underlay....have you had a sniff of it? I would be tempted to ditch the carpet.

The smell you describe is dry rot. Do you have any dark orange spore like dust any where. Dry rot is not dry it is very very wet wood.

Lift up some floorboards or remove some skirting and get a damp expert out to do a quote.

Sorry OP just noticed you have mentioned dry rot, tell tale sign can be dark orange rust coloured dust but I read something about dry rot in Chatsworth house, the rot had travelled meters and meters before a mushroom grew in the Aga, I think the orange dust comes from the spores out the mushrooms.

Leave the house for 30 minutes, re enter holding your nose (breathing through your mouth)... Enter a room and sniff every where (floor, sinks, cupboards, drains, fireplace, walls). Keep doing this until you can pinpoint where the smell is strongest. If it's everywhere, as your neighbours, do they have the same problem? If its one room in particular, then go for it with the room. By that clever paint that absorbs odour and repaint, dispose of the carpet totally and if you're willing to go the whole hog lift the floorboards to check. If you have a chimney (hire a sweep - could something have died up there? Although that wouldn't smell for 2 years). Pour hard core drain cleaner down drains.

If all else fails, yes then move I suppose... Can everyone smell it or just you?

We had an unpleasant smell in the exact areas you describe in our Victorian terrace. Sometimes it was very slight, other times almost overpowering. It didn't smell like drains/sewage but having pulled up the floorboards (and viewing into all 4 corners with a camera) and having the chimney swept (and viewing that with a camera dropped down it) we thought we'd better check the drains. The sewage pipe flows right under our house and I was terrified it had collapsed and we'd be paying a fortune for it to be fixed.

We contacted some AMAZING drain people. They suggested it may be rats tunnelling from a redundant vent pipe or similar. They charged us about £170 to put a camera down. Turns out the cap which stops the main sewer smell venting back into the property was missing. They replaced it there and then and the smell was gone within 24 hours. Will try to find their details, they are total experts MUCH better than dynorod who I had out first and who were clueless in the extreme.

They can be contacted through draindomain.com - which in itself is full of really helpful information and a section where you can ask a question and get an emailed response free of charge (that's how I ended up booking them for my house)

Do you have a bat roost in the loft? We have an awful smell in our kitchen and it ended up being the smell of bats guano and urine. I have no idea why it's strongest in the kitchen as opposed to an upstairs room closer to the loft but it's been suggested to me that there may be droppings in the wall cavities.
There's not a great deal we can do as we are tenants and they'd only drop more if we managed to clean it out anyway. We're just hoping it will fade a bit come winter!

How old are your electrical fittings? We bought a house, renovated it and had a total rewire. There was this strange smell....almost fishy, but not really. It was the new light fittings. We had them replaced and no small since. Worth checking......

Probably isn't, but if your shoes are near the hallway, its not that is it?

If the previous people smoked, have they wallpapered over existing filthy wallpaper?
Would not be worse in hallway though. Maybe a family of mice under hallway floor?

Our house stank when we moved in because of mouldy walls (undiscovered burst tank in loft, house unoccupied), ancient wet carpets and wet floorboards, previous owner's cat and dog, ...
After almost a year and months and months of drying it now finally stopped smelling.

My first thought, second thought and third thought would be the smell is caused by the drains ...and I do this type of thing or a living

It may be worth having a drainage survey carried out. It's a useful thing to have done anyhow so even if the smell didnt turn out to be the drains it is not a waste of money. (IMO)

Or, it might be a small isolated water leak or rats. Most other smells would have gone away after a while

The link to DrainDomain.Com is useful but any drainage company can register with them so just because someone had a great experience or a bad experience doesn't mean you will. It's just like a Yellow Pages for drainage companies.

start looking under the floorboards. Often the easiest ones to lift are under the stairs where there is no fitted carpet or laminate, but you are going to have to take up sections all round the ground floor. Taking up your fancy flooring will be cheaper than moving house.

It is very likely a leak, need not be drains, could be a pipe. If you have one or more water tanks in your loft, go and see if any of them are constantly refilling or dripping to make up lost water. If you have a water meter turn off all the taps and look to see if the bubble is turning. If you have yard gullies outside tge kitchen or elsewhere, they may well be cracked underground.

How many airbricks do you have ventilating the subfloor void; how far apart are they; have any of them been blocked e.g. by building something in front of them?

Well....I think we have cracked it! Thank you so much for all your helpful suggestions. Inspired by the advice to look under the floorboards, at 11pm (!) last night DH and I pulled up the carpet and underlay and levered up a floorboard. I was half expecting to find a dead body, but no - just dust, no mildew, no dry rot etc. In fact, no smell at all down there, only above the boards. However one sniff of the underlay (and the carpet itself just a bit less) and we nearly passed out. It was nauseating. I have no idea why it stank like that, but we spent until nearly 1am ripping it all out and taking it to the garden, and levering up all the tacks.

We now have dusty bare wooden boards in the hall for the moment, but the fantastic news is the smell does seem to have reduced massively. The reaL test will be to go out for a few hours and give it the nose check when we get back, but I do think we actually might have solved it - and in that case the prize goes to NeoMaxiZoomDweebie for suggesting the underlay. Thank you all again.

We had this exact same thing, carpet was smelling RANK! Turned out the from front door was letting in water when it rained

Hooray

If you don't have double glazing i assume you have a wooden door? Check if the water is getting in there otherwise the boards might rot.

Goon news

I meant GOOD not goon

Glad it's sorted

Dry rot stinks like that. Did you survey before you bought? If you have wooden flooring, it could just be in that, but a lot of Victorian terraces have foundations that are susceptible to dry rot. It is a very definite mushroom tang.