I want to rip my nose off!!

[Beyondbearable]

Name changed for this because, well, no one would really want to admit to this problem.

We discovered we had rats in the house 2weeks ago, called someone out, blocked where we suspected they were entering, bleached and scrubbed everywhere etc etc. No evidence of rats since, all good. At least we thought!

For the past four days there is an awful smell, which I can only describe as rotten chicken/meat, in one downstairs room. We can pin point the smell to certain areas of the floor, about three specific points, but the whole room is starting to smell too. We have concluded that there is prob a dead rat (or several) under the floorboards in the footings of the house. We cannot get to this space to find and remove whatever it is under there.

So my question is this, how do i get rid of this smell, or at least dampen it down to make it bearable whilst we wait it out for the rat to decompose and dry up??

I'm hoping this thread doesn't turn into a debate of how rats should be dealt with in the first place, we are where we are and I just need to somehow deal with the smell.

Likewise for pulling up the floor, that is not an option either.

So please wise mumsnetters, does anyone have any suggestions?

Honestly you need to pull up floorboards and find the corpse. We have had to do this several times with a dead mouse. Even a mouse can make a whole room smell for a month, once we had a mouse die somewhere inside a wall (v old house, rural) and although DH took up many boards we couldn’t get to it. We literally had to close the room up for a month as it was unusable. A rat can smell for a shockingly long time. My Mum had one die under a floor where it was impossible to get the corpse out and the smell was terrible, even a year later you could still faintly smell dead rat in that part of the building,

We've had dead rats under the floorboards before now and the smell doesn't last too long.

If you're the only person in your family who is really struggling, maybe you're unlucky enough to be very sensitive to smells.

As covering up the smell with other scents isn't working for you, maybe swutch focus to stop your nostrils from picking up the smell.

I'm trying to remember from tv crime shows, what do police use when going in a morgue? Maybe something like Vicks or peppermint oil under the nostrils.

My username is about this topic. We had that awful smell in the summer plus the endless flies. In our case pest control removed the bodies after a few days and the smell went. Not sure how long it would have been otherwise.

You have my sympathies. It's revolting to have to deal with.

@helpmyback I'm not ignoring the suggestion, I have contacted him and he has said there's nothing he can do, I just forgot to mention that on the thread when replying to people. Perhaps we didn't pick the best guy to do it because alot of people seem to have had them come back out to deal with the corpse, but our guy won't.

@Christwosheds we can't just pull the floorboards up, it's alot of work and destruction to do so and there's no guarantee we will even be able to find it. You have given a couple of examples yourself of still not being able to get to it, so if we can avoid the mess and disruption of doing so, then we will.

Thanks to those suggestions Vicks etc too, I'll give that a go as well

Yes - it's grim. But in the end you have to wait it out. We have had this several times. The worst was a large bird that somehow got into the cavity wall alongside the stairs. We knew it was trapped as we could here it flapping around as we went up and down, but we could not rescue it without taking the wall down - and then it died ..... and then the smell .... and then the bluebottles ....... groan .....

Hear, not here .......

@Mischance we had similar with a baby bird that fell down our chimney from its nest, we assumed, (we now have a thing over the top to stop nesting) couldn't get to it as chimney was all blocked up internally. Once it died it was only a very faint smell though and we solved it by lighting the log burner and the flu dried it out.

This time round the stench is so much worse and in several different spots, I just want it gone 😭

There was only the one occasion where the body was in a wall and we couldn’t get it. Hopefully you won’t have to pull up boards but if you do, it isn’t all that difficult and we have never damaged a board (1820s floor). It is more of a problem if you have fitted carpets though. Normally you can narrow down the area from the smell and not need to take up many boards, one is often enough. Rats are large and easy to spot - our occasional mice (usually voles actually) die because they nest in old fibreglass insulation that kill’s them, and also makes them harder to find as they are inside it, but we still do always find them fairly quickly, apart from the one inside the wall.

Oh god so sorry that is awful.

I don't suppose you can call another one int to finish this job.

Hope you get it sorted !

You can get ozone deodoriser bombs from Amazon

Hope that is a helpful suggestion - I did not mean to be so snarky! Hopefully will tide you over but not sure how long the effect will last.

A friend had this once, and I remember her saying that after a few weeks! the smell resolved itself. It was a dead rat that eventually finished decomposing, so no more smell.

@Christwosheds this is our problem, we have carpets that have not long been laid, we're worried that if we pull it up, we won't get it back down again due to the fact that they stretch the carpet to fit it to the edges and it's still new so hasn't relaxed enough yet, if that makes sense. Plus there are at least four spots of intense smell (when we get closer to the floor) that span the width of the room, so it wouldn't just be one floor board. I'm not trying to be argumentative and do appreciate the responses, just tying to explain why it's not as simple as pulling the floor up.

@helpmyback that's ok, I know your just trying to help, I just accepted what this guy has told me and assumed that they don't come back for the disposal side of things. Perhaps another company would come to help so I might explore that option

Perhaps an ozone machine might help? Ozone is really toxic to human health so you need to make sure you seal the room well and don't go in for some time afterwards. But hopefully it would also kill any maggots to stop them turning into bluebottles, as well as removing smell.