At first we thought it was the sewer, so we called the sewer repair company. That was two weeks ago. The smell now is so bad we can’t use the powder room. Just one bathroom, mind you. The others are fine. To be honest, I know the difference between rotting sewage and rotting carcasses (years of living in the woods, people. We’ve seen it all). Guess which one is somewhere in that bathroom?
We’ve tried baking soda (ha! barely touched the smell), vinegar (now it smells like rotting salad dressing), turning the fan on (which exacerbates it – can squirrels really crawl down those vent pipes and get stuck? I’m saying yep!), and now we’re up to sealing off the room until the smell goes away, which may take quite a while longer, depending on size and type of carcass and where in the devil it may now be lodged. I smell it in the kitchen. I smell it four rooms away. I smell it in my sleep (luckily, that’s merely the ghost of the smell in my brain). I’m stuck here all day with it. It hates me. I hate it. We both want to part ways, but aside from ripping out the bathroom walls or climbing on the roof and trying to extract something in gawd-knows-what-condition, there’s nothing to be done but wait.
He wanted to blame my sauerkraut curing in the laundry room, but if sauerkraut ever smelled that bad, I’d have refused to eat it let alone make it. No, we both know where it is.
I’m on the lookout for garden lime. Something. ANYTHING. My next step is to seal the entire bathroom in plastic wrap.
Anyone have a way to absorb or rid ourselves of this gawd-awful smell?
Oh woe is you. I think you have to wait it out. Hey, maybe it’s a plague from those overdue clients. 🙂
Har har, Ang. ;))
Ewwwwwwww… I don’t know, but I’ve turned it over to my favorite DIY-er, hope to hear from her soon!
I am the DIYer of whom Carrie speaks. I write books on this sort of thing.
Here’s what I’d check: if the wax ring on the toilet is cracked or otherwise bad, yucky stuff can leak out around the horn of the toilet (a part on the bottom of the toilet that extends toward the drain lines).
A leak in the base of the toilet could cause much the same problem. You have to take up the toilet to check, but it’s not that hard to do. I can send directions if you think you want.
Also, you should check the trap below the sink (the U-shaped part of the drain line). If it’s cracked or leaking, that might be the problem. Every time you run the water, some stays in the trap to seal off the drain and keep sewer gas from entering your house. If the trap is dry, sewer gas rises through the drain.
If you’ve got sewer gas in the house, it’s more than an annoyance–it can make you and your family sick. Until you need to get this figured out pronto. In the meantime, make sure the area is very well ventilated.
I’ll check back and see if you’ve made any progress. Let me know if you have questions or there’s any way I can help.
Thanks, Jerri! We have the sewer folks coming in this week, but to be honest, this is definitely more of a road-kill smell. The sink – checked out fine. I’ve had my head under that cabinet, as has the man, and we’ve determined the smell is not so strong there. I’ll have him check the base today. It’s not stronger in one area than another. As I said, it does not appear in any other bathroom.
Carrie, thank you for sending Jerri my way! I’ll go sniff around and post back….
When I was growing up, we had this one wall in our house that was like dead mouse central. It was right at the bottom of the steps to my brother’s room, right by the kitchen. Every couple of months, a mouse would fall down while running across the top of the inside of the wall (I try not to think about how many mice we must have had gallivanting around my house’s innards for this to be such a common problem) and would fall down and get stuck there and die. And stink. We figured enough of them would eventually pile up in there that it would fill the gap and no more would die. Remind me to check with my mom on that…
kk, who feels your pain