Heather says:
Need proof I’m down here in the trenches with the rest of you? I recently had to play the game we all dread, What is THAT Smell?
I had isolated it to the kitchen, ruled out liquid potatoes (there’s a story for another day, rotten potatoes rank right with dead animals on the odor scale), I cleaned out the garbage disposal, emptied the trash, made sure nothing had fallen behind it, too.
Eventually I opened the cabinet under the sink, which still has toddler locks 1. Apparently, my oh-so-helpful children had been shoving wet rags through the tip out trays under the sink. Nice.
It had been three weeks since I’d had any reason to go under the sink, so who knows how long they had been putrefying. The real confession? I threw them out instead of using my own tips for mildew removal.
Life isn’t as perfect as we like to pretend. Magazines and television set standards most of us will never attain. No one’s home is perfect, unless they can afford staff and despite my plans of world domination, I’m not in that league. What about you?
The Sunday Confessional is open, you’re human, spill it.
1This is an affiliate link for a product I love. If you come to my house, you’ll notice the actual included magnet is long gone and we use a random magnet from an old hard drive. That’s how geeks roll.
My husband and I moved our bedroom around a few weeks ago and found a rotten lime under the bed. It didn't smell, but it had to of been under there for months. My toddler likes to put his food in his toy box in his room, which is awesome. I have found waffles, chicken fingers, bacon, you name it. I seriously thank my stars we don't have bugs.
Years ago when our family lived in Houston Texas we lived in an upstairs condo. One evening I am on the computer doing something and I smelled smoke that smelled like an electrical fire. My desk was sitting right next to the kitchen and so I searched all over that condo looking for signs of smoke. I finally gave up and called the fire dept because we had two small children and I did not want to be responsible for burning down the entire complex. I guess it was 10 minutes later and here comes a pumper truck, ladder truck, fire chief and the police. The fire chief came through the front door and smelled the air. He asked me where the dishwasher was. He walked into the kitchen and opened it up and removed the baby bottle top that had fallen down on the heating element. I was so embarrassed but the fire dept chief was fairly gracious and told me he would rather respond to something like that vs having a building fully ablaze.
Oh yeah potatoes are BAD… I had to start putting them in my fridge because I kept forgetting about them in the cupboard, until the stink started. I would put them in the one right by the fridge and for some reason it always took my pulling the fridge out to see if the smell was under there, to realize it was where I left them.
We had this happen last week. Evidently the bag boy at the grocery store put my hamburger meat in the bread bag, unbeknownst to me. It stayed in said bag for 4 days before we finally found it. The smell was almost enough to drive us all out of the house! From now on, noone bags my groceries except me.
yep those potatoes can sure stink the place up! i live out in the country and twice a year we go around the house inside and out and seal up any holes or cracks as we get field mice on occasion. but the worst is squirrels- those cute little brown flufftails will put a person through hell- they have been known to chew their way in or out and the smell of a dead one is far worse than that of a dead mouse. often, we also check the foundation around our house and look for holes that armadillos may have dug. one time late at night i heard this awful chewing outside of my bedroom window and the next morning we discovered that something had chewed our telephone wires! as cute as those little creatures are in the forest we do everything we can to keep them in the forest!
What about a really, really bad smell? We had a bad odor in the kitchen, eventually found a dead mouse in a trap under the sink. I removed it then cleaned out the cabinet with a 10 % bleach solution (sprayed it all over, let it sit for 10 minutes, wiped it off, TWICE). That helped a lot, but there is still a lingering odor. I just attacked it with bleach again, but it didn’t help. Any suggestions?
So this is pretty gross, but some of the fluids from decomposition probably soaked into the fibers of the cabinetry. Since it is inside the sink cabinet and it’s not something you have to look at you can use a paint like KILLZ which will encapsulate it.