Monday, June 15, 2009

The Smell

For the past few months DH and I have been catching a whiff of a terrible smell. It isn't there all the time. In fact it is only rarely that the odor wafts across us and we look at each other and say, "Did you smell that?"

At first we thought it was the dog farting. Or the baby pooping. But it was a bad garbage-y smell but worse that that. We only smelled it in a couple of places, usually when sitting on the couch. It lasts for about 30 seconds, tops, and then disappears, sometimes for a couple of hours or days only to return again.

We have done everything possible to try and track down the smell. We checked the closets, the pantry, moved the couch and shampooed the rug. We crawled around and held our noses to the air while sniffing. We smelled in closets, by air vents and in cabinets. And nothing. No seeming origin for the smell. Has anyone else experienced this? Should I just assume it's some small animal that died somewhere and eventually it will decompose and we won't smell it any more? Ah, the joys of home ownership!

1 comment:

LauraC said...

This DID happen to me (or rather, a friend in college) once!!

It was a dead rat in the couch. It was a pet rat though that escaped from someone's dorm room, climbed under the offending couch and into the frame of the couch, then got crushed by people sitting on it. It smelled when people first sat down on the couch.

We also smelled something horrible in our house and eventually checked our crawl space. Dead decaying possum in there.