Searching for a mystery smell in my house

I used to think nothing was more annoying than a mystery beep somewhere in the house. Is it one of the smoke detectors? The carbon monoxide detector? The open door of the dryer?

But there is something more annoying than a mystery beep: a mystery smell. Good luck changing the batteries in that — if you can even find it.

We thought our smell was related to recent plumbing work. After months of not using an upstairs, walk-in shower that had started leaking into the living room below, we finally decided to have it replaced.

There is nothing glamorous about replacing a walk-in shower in an 80-year-old house, especially when you’re replacing it with an exact duplicate. There wasn’t room for anything else. The high-end bathrooms in those home design shows may feature multi-nozzle rainforest showers, smart toilets and his-and-her bidets. We just wanted a shower that was watertight, even if it wasn’t much bigger than a casket.

The grout was still wet — the new shower still untested — when we noticed an odor in another part of the house entirely. The smell was at the very top of the basement stairs. Open the door in the hallway to the basement and you’d be hit by a waft of... what, exactly?

It smelled like sewage to us. Perhaps, we thought, bashing out the old shower and severing the pipes that fed and drained it had inadvertently upset the house’s circulatory system. Maybe a vent or a trap wasn’t doing what it should.

Bad smells are... bad. I don’t know how else to put it. You can close your eyes to a crappy view. You can’t close your nose to a crappy smell. This is a fact with which we are unfortunately familiar.

A decade ago, My Lovely Wife took a job in The Hague. For a year, she lived in a cute townhouse with vertiginous stairs to an upper floor and a ground-floor bathroom that stank. The Dutch didn’t turn their country into a global trading powerhouse by being softies, and so it was that Ruth’s landlord first claimed there was no smell, then said if there was a smell, it wasn’t that bad, and then admitted it was bad, but, well, too bad for her.

Ruth doused the bathroom with air freshener and kept a rubber mat over the suspiciously large floor drain in the shower.

Three years ago we stayed at a hotel in Sicily. Our hotel room overlooked azure waters and smelled faintly of whatever the opposite of azure waters is. Brown waters, I guess.

Was this just what the Mediterranean smelled like there? Was it the town? Was it the hotel’s primitive plumbing?

In the end, we decided it didn’t smell that bad. We said nothing and breathed through our mouths.

But back to the mystery smell in our house. It’s an odd case. The odor is extremely localized. You can’t smell it down in the basement. And you can’t smell it in the rest of the house. It’s something you pass through on your way down the stairs. It occupies a specific level, like an inversion layer hovering over a city.

Our plumber investigated. He walked through the house, mentally tracing the paths of the pipes. He ran water from different faucets. Then he said the words I had feared but was afraid to voice out loud: “To me, it smells like a dead animal.”

We like to think of our houses as impermeable fortresses when in fact they are full of holes that offer access to food and shelter.

Our basement is classic 1950s suburbia: wood paneling on the walls, thick plaster on the ceiling. The stairs make a right turn halfway down and underneath them is storage space. I probed the chamber’s corners with a flashlight, pushing away boxes of Christmas and Halloween decorations. Had a mouse suffered a coronary somewhere in the closet’s recesses? Did a squirrel get in and then realize he couldn’t find his way out?

I couldn’t find anything, which means if there is something decomposing in our basement, it’s hidden behind a wall. The only way to find it is to bash away with a sledgehammer.

But where would we even start? Unless we dismantled the stairwell, there’s no guarantee we’d even find the source of the smell.

So we’re waiting it out. Everything stops smelling eventually, right? For the last two weeks our basement stairs have resembled a strange shrine. Little jars of a gel that’s supposed to suck smells out of the air rest on every other step. Fabric pouches filled with bamboo charcoal hang at intervals along the banister. A HEPA-filtered air cleaner is plugged in and runs 24/7. It all seems to be helping.

I take solace in the fact that when archaeologist Howard Carter entered the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922, all he smelled was the faint scent of embalming oil. He didn’t smell King Tut’s rotting corpse.

I just hope it doesn’t take 3,000 years for our smell to go away.

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.

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