So, we live in an old house. Michael and I in particular live in an old basement. It's old. Sometimes there are smells. Sometimes the water in the bend in the pipes evaporates and then sewer gases can come through. Oh, have we learned that smell. But there's been a new smell over the past couple weeks that has been persistent and altogether bothersome. It's similar to say... a rotting corpse smell.
And no, I've never really smelled a rotting corpse before. But the thing about that smell, though, is that you just kind of
know it
. We couldn't tell where it was coming from. Some of us thought it was an extension of a sewer smell, and was therefore coming from the vicinity of the laundry room. But some of us noted that it was stronger in the TV room than the laundry room-- it must be coming from there. Some of us thought it was coming from outside the house. Some of us thought it was in the crawl space under the house. Some of us thought it was coming from the walls. Some of us believed all of these things at one point or other, depending up who had the most persuasive argument at the time.
We called our pest control people first, because we surmised that if they had killed something, say, rats in the wall, then maybe they would also dispose of it. But they don't do that. Then we starting calling plumbers, on the theory that below the house one of the sewage pipes had sprung a leak. They said that, Number 1, it would be very expensive for them to even check to see if that was the case, even before "fixing it" costs. And, Number 2, it might be something dead in the catch basin, and that particular plumber doesn't do catch basins.
Our biggest theory, after consulting this plumber and then Michele-our-resident-architect, was that something had crawled into our theoretical catch basin and died. We called another plumber that did catch basins, and scheduled an appointment for 11:00 on Saturday.
At 3:30 on Saturday, with the plumber still not present, Michael got restless and once again began the by now very common Search For The Smell's Source. He went further from the house than others who had searched outside, and found in the basement of our garage the rotting corpse of a cat. Have I mentioned that we have cats in our garage? He also found a large pipe that leads under our back patio and presumeably to the house, into the area just under the TV room where the smell was strongest. Michael took a shovel and heroically disposed of Fluffy, who unfortunately was not named by roommate Emily until after his or her death.
The smell lessened to a linger very quickly. We declared our triumph.
But then, by Sunday afternoon, the smell had not only not ceased to linger, but it would definitely become stronger at times. I began my own personal Search For The Smell's Source, and decided that it was emanating from the TV. Well, not the TV exactly, but from underneath the built-in bookshelf in the wall in which the TV is positioned. I developed two theories, one much more hopeful than the other. One was that the dead-cat-in-the-garage had released rotting-corpse-gas, some of which had gone through the pipe, entered underneath our basement, and gotten caught up inside the wall where it could not rise or disperse quickly, and that after a few days it would go away. Two was that there were two dead animals, that someone in the neighborhood had likely decided to poison cats, that one of them returned to its residence in our garage basement to die, and that one of them had gone in search for a hide-away to die within, and it crawled through that pipe, into our crawlspace, then up into our wall. Where its remains remain.
Michael and Emily and I discussed our options based on what we knew. I finally decided that I had to psych myself up in order to go into the crawlspace and try to retrieve Fluffy's cousin. I was set. I was ready. Then I opened the trapdoor and became very quickly unset and unready. But I did stick my head into it, and there was no rotting corpse smell. It had to be coming from the wall.
Awhile later, Michelle came home and became all of our personal hero. She went into the crawlspace. I couldn't believe it. It's awful down there. But she found nothing that she could retrieve. She found no Smell's Source. It had to be in the wall.
As I've mentioned, there is a bookshelf built into this wall. We took the bottom shelf out. It had two layers-- a nice, sturdy shelf layer, and a thin, crappy plyboard layer. We destroyed the latter. The Smell's Source is there. Probably just underneath the structural "wall stuff" that was underneath the plyboard we destroyed. Holy Cow it smelled awful!
We are currently directorless. So, without a director to call, we called the director's liaison to the Provincial. I left a message about the rotting corpse smell and how we need someone with construction know-how to get into the wall. Wish us luck with that. In the meantime, we have sealed up the opening we created with plastic trashbags and duct tape. Then we piled on old sofa cushions we just happened to have in the closet. The smell is down to a mild linger, but the room is pretty useless to us currently.
Oh, What An Adventure!
And by the way, the GRE went fine.
