To say this has been a smelly couple of months is a bit of an understatement. In fact, it’s been downright rancid.
It’s not that I don’t clean. In fact, I spend a couple hours every day cleaning. If you ask my husband (and now probably my mother-in-law who spent the past week witnessing my cleaning frenzies), I clean too much.
But sometimes stinky things happen that are out of our control.
It all started with our upstairs toilet.
One day we started noticing a bit of a sewage like odor coming from it. We flushed it a couple times, cleaned it, freshened it, but that smell simply would not go away.
In fact, it was getting worse.
Tyler knew exactly what to do. He had seen this before. Something about a Pee trap in the shower. I asked him why there would be a pee trap in the shower and not the toilet because clearly that is where you trap pee. And he told me it was PEA trap with an A and I told him that was a stupid name.
But he said he just needed to pour water in the drain and the problem would be solved.
Several buckets of water later, it still smelled.
Well, that was the extent of our plumbing knowledge so we had to track down our plumber (the one doesn’t seem to really want to be our plumber). And I”m pretty sure asking him to deal with our sewage leaking toilet wasn’t going to help his eagerness to deal with our plumbing.
Well, the first thing he suggested was to flood the PEA trap. Which, of course, made Tyler feel like he just earned his professional plumbing badge for already knowing that. And the second thing he suggested was to reseal the base of the toilet, in case it wore off and the smell is leaking through there.
So, off to the hardware store we went to grab some sealant. And, like the professional plumber he now was, Tyler sealed that toilet right up.
And the smell stayed.
It was about this time that we ran into our contractor and he suggested that something might have crawled somewhere up there and died. And we assured him that this was definitely the smell of sewage. Why we thought we were now experts on sewage smells, I’m not sure. But this odor was clearly sewage.
Our next suggestion (given to us by one of the 8 children who used to live in this house and is also a plumber) was to get down to the source. Meaning, remove the toilet and seal up the pipes.
Well, no one had time at the moment to do that involved of a job, so we simply shut the door and pretended that bathroom didn’t exist (because that solves all of life’s problems, clearly).
Now, we are going to time jump a bit here in the story so hold on for the ride.
First, I’m going to take you to a few weeks later. Tyler, Calvin, and I are sitting on the couch, watching a movie (don’t ask me what movie because I don’t remember) and I keep getting whiffs of that toilet.
“I think the toilet’s getting worse. I’m smelling it down here now.” I say.
“I smell something too,” says Calvin.
And Tyler brushes it off and says he’ll take a look at it when he has time and we continue watching our movie.
That night, Tyler is falling asleep on the couch, and as he starts to doze off, a very volatile odor keeps entering his nasal cavity. And sleep simply won’t come under those circumstances. That is how he found himself, in the middle of the night, removing pieces of our couch.
Why our couch?
Well let me take you back a few days.
To the middle of the night. While Tyler and I lay sleeping.
We are woken in the middle of the night to the sound of our cat. She is wanting to play. At 3 in the morning. She has a very recognizable meow that she uses when she wants to play and runs around with her toy mouse in her mouth.
But this time, she chose to play in the middle of the night. Which is not her usual playtime hour.
So Tyler gets up to find out what she wants.
And of course he finds that our cat has caught her first REAL mouse.
Now, I know that it is a natural thing to own cats in order to rid your house of mice. And that seems like a great way to deal with the problem. But you see, not all cats catch mice for food. They do not catch said mouse, give it a killing blow and then proceed to feast on their prize.
No, some cats PLAY with their mice. And as sweet and charming as this may sound, what PLAY means in the land of kitties is actually torture that results in a long, drawn out, painful death.
So when Gingerbread caught this mouse, she carried it in her mouth and then proceeded to drop it in the foyer and that mouse took off for dear life.
It ended up under the heater, and Tyler wasn’t in the mood to try to get it out at 3 in the morning, so he placed the live trap under the heater and placed a box in front of the opening so the mouse had nowhere to go but in the trap. Which seemed like a reasonable solution. Mouse lives, gets trapped, gets removed from house. Everyone is happy (except Gingerbread but a little fresh chicken will solve that problem.)
And he went back to bed.
Not long after, here comes gingerbread making her play meow once again.
That mouse had found a way out. Straight to the jaws of Gingerbread.
This time, as Tyler went to go retrieve it, Gingerbread dropped it and it scurried under the couch.
Still tired, as it was still the middle of the night, Tyler decided at that point that the mouse could simply find his way back to where he came in at.
Here is where the scene switches back to Tyler tearing the couch apart a couple days later after being haunted by an awful bathroom smell.
And sure enough, he found the source.
A severely decomposed mouse under our couch. Which he promptly (and wisely) disposed of before I woke and came upon the grisly murder scene.
Now, I’m sure you are wondering what this all has to do with our upstairs toilet. And I promise you, it comes back full circle.
Because once I realized what the living room smell was, I got to thinking. The mouse smelled an awful lot like the bathroom upstairs.
And so, out of pure curiosity, I decided to test a theory. I carefully returned to the upstairs bathroom, now shut up for several weeks, simply for the opportunity to take a whiff of its existence.
Sure enough, I found that the smell was almost completely gone.
Tyler did further investigation, checking in the attic for a large rotting corpse, but found nothing.
We may never know what exactly the source of the bathroom smell was. Wether it was something that crawled in the wall or whatnot and died or whether whatever was causing it simply worked its way out due to not being used. Whatever it was, it appears to be going away. Because apparently you CAN close a door and ignore all your problems and they will simply go away.
Also, I didn’t have any photos of all this (you are welcome) but here is a photo of the toilet in all its pink glamour.
