It probably started about three weeks ago. The late August sun would beat down on our ramshackle back addition. We were in and out, leaving bags of damp towels and swim suits, piles of dirty laundry, diaper bags and assorted detritus amidst the heaping pile of shoes. The adjacent toilet sometimes backed up. There was a lot of clutter.
So when I first got a whiff of a slightly malodorous scent, I didn’t worry. Something was going musty in the heat. Of course it was.
I opened up all the swim bags and washed and dried and folded and put away all the assorted bathing gear. The smell just got stronger. What was that smell? I knew that smell from somewhere. It was like … stagnant water left sitting in an upturned bucket by the debris from your recently deconstructed, but not actually cleaned up chimney … or something like that.
I kept stepping in and out of the room from inside. Was it something under the porch? In the doorway? Next to the steps? No, it really did seem to be coming from inside. Was it the bathroom? The unused tub? The general toilet area (gta)? No. The bathroom was actually in decent shape.
The smell just got stronger. I now had even less of a clue as to what it might be. I went through all the bags and purses looking for dirty diapers. I walked around the room sniffing and sniffing. Was it coming from the shoes themselves? No. The inside of my washer? No. Behind the washer/dryer! Maybe there was a leak? Nope. You guys, I was this close to taking everything out of the room, scrubbing down every surface and starting from scratch. (Actually, that’s still not a bad idea.)
Then, just a couple days ago, I was doing a load of laundry when the smell seemed to get even stronger. It was definitely coming from the washing machine. This time I was sure. I leaned over the front-loading machine, careful not to disturb the pile of kiddie artwork, clothes and empty coffee cups on the top and sniffed. OH GOD, THAT WAS FOUL. Yep, definitely coming from behind the washing machine. Probably a dirty diaper that gets heated up when the machine is running. I’d get Ed to pull out the machine as soon as he got home. Definitely solved that one at last. Thank goodness.
Then, as I was getting the girls ready to go meet Colum at the school bus, I reached over to pluck a pair of baby-sized capri leggings off the washer. They were caught under something and I gave them a little tug. AND THEN THE WORST SMELL YOU CAN IMAGINE (short of rotting rodent carcasses) came emanating from the top of my washing machine. As Colum would say, “What the _?”
Yeah, so. It turns out that the empty take out coffee cup on my washer wasn’t empty after all. It turns out that it was half filled with coffee that had been sitting there for so long that it started to turn green and to rot. The smell of the rot slowly made it’s way past the cheap plastic lid of the coffee cup and permeated through my back addition. Until, finally, I knocked over the cup and it poured oozed onto an otherwise clean cloth diaper, thus fouling the diaper but preventing a disgusting clean up. How did I not just clean up the cup weeks before? What depths of slovenliness am I living in? I was deeply ashamed and vowed never to speak a word of this to anyone.
Afterward:
I STILL need to properly clean and organize the back room which is now sagging from the weight of back-to-school clutter. The diaper that took one for the team has been washed and is currently hanging in the sun for the second consecutive day, stained a blue-green coffee rot colour that I doubt will ever come out. I may have to say goodbye to that diaper.
Please tell me, do you have any horrifying housecleaning mishaps to make me feel better? Anyone?
6 replies on “The Smell That Wouldn’t Die”
I spent the entire summer trying to figure out what the stink in my fridge was. Everytime someone opened the door, the whole kitchen would smell. My mom even cleaned the fridge for me (as in emptied it, scrubbed the shelves, etc) and could not locate the noxious substance. Stinkeriffic it was in our house. I threw out all sorts of things that were probably perfectly edible, in an effort to just. Make. It. Stop. Already! All to no avail…
FINALLY, I lay my hands upon a container of ricotta cheese that appeared (through the white, opaque plastic container…yes, I said OPAQUE) to be a “darker” color than it should be. I cracked the lid and unleashed a smell so foul I cannot describe it. Apparently, an open container of ricotta cheese does not last more than a year past it’s expiry date. Lesson learned. Hopefully.
HOLD up! Ricotta is not good for over a year?! Not even in the fridge? *sigh* I now have another thing to clean.
I know! You would think that this information would be available somewhere!!
OK, it’s not totally house cleaning related, but kind of is.
When my partner and I moved in together, I was living with him for a long time before we were officially living together (I even moved my cat to his place months before all of my stuff made the move).
I loved my apartment at Yonge and Eglinton. What I didn’t love about it was the pigeons that took over my balcony. They were everywhere all the time. They laid eggs, they pooped, it was not pleasant.
About a week before moving day, I was in my apartment and noticed it stank. Like really, really, stank. I assumed it was because I hadn’t been living in it. My stuff was still there though, so maybe the air was stale.
On moving day, my dad commented on the smell. I shrugged my shoulders. “Stale air,” I said. Then we moved the bicycle that had been on my balcony for the last year.
I had wrapped it in a tarp to protect it from the weather in the wintertime. The tarp had come loose, but I never fixed it. In the tarp were two adult pigeons, four baby pigeons (who weren’t really babies anymore) and a whole lot of pigeon poop.
It was so bad, we had to throw out the bike and tarp. Yuck.
We somehow once left a whole chicken downstairs in the basement in a plastic bag for about a month or two while we wondered what the hell the horrible smell was! It was a long time before I could eat chicken again
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