Jennifer and I had been struggling since last Monday to determine the source of a mild to moderately strong rotting-like smell that has been developing in the downstairs part of our house. We first noticed it in the rec room, and spent days scratching our heads and searching the room for a possible source. It wasn’t in the closet, emptying the room’s garbage can didn’t help, etc.
So we closed the door to that room to see if maybe it was coming from somewhere else. Sure enough–the smell was no longer noticeable in there, but it was in the hall. The problem is, there are even fewer places for a source to hid in the hallway… Sigh. Perhaps it’s one of the other rooms attached to the hall. Surely not, but let’s try.
So I closed up all of the rooms attached to the downstairs hallway, and closed all the windows in the house to minimize air currents that might move the smell around. This involved moving the cats’ litter pan to a different room since they’d be locked out of their normal "bathroom"–and we had already mostly ruled out the litter pan as a possible source–it just didn’t stink enough to be the source.
I gave it yet another day to settle, and went looking for the smell. It seemed to be coming from the laundry room (the cats’ bathroom) afterall. I gave up and decided it _must_ be the litter pan, so I washed it top to bottom. It was a hot day, so I re-opened some windows and even set up the window fan to suck some cool evening air into the house. This made the smell in the laundry room worse. Which was very weird because the litter pan had not yet been put back in the laundry room.
I finally decided that it _must_ be coming from some vent because the fan had to be moving substantial air over the source for it to have gotten that much worse in a mere 5 or 10 minutes. The only thing that seemed to meet that description was the vent to the under-house crawlspace.
Only barely motivated to bother, but quite interested in making the damn smell go away, I put my shoes back on, got my headlamp, and went spelunking in the crawl space. Not 5 feet from the entrance, I found a large gray animal carcass of some sort. It didn’t really look like a rat, but it was definitely a mammal and probably a rodent.
Amazingly, despite my pathetically weak stomach, I managed to use the inside-out garbage bag trick to pick up the decaying body and take it out to the trash. Unfortunately, a small pile of fly larvae were left behind.
I think I’ll set some traps to make sure that the dead animal doesn’t have other friends queued up to replace his… ahem… role in my life.