malodorous mystery

You might remember our recent post on our new rugs.

Keeping this in mind, read on...

We arrived home late Wednesday night, after several days of traveling all over the state to visit family for Christmas. After unloading the car, we start to get ready for bed. We were sitting on the bed, looking at an old Better Homes & Garden magazine (from 1935) that Anita and Robert (my sis and brother-in-law) gave us.

"Do you smell something?" I asked B.

"It smells like something...rotting," B responds.

"Like something...dead," I say.

We look at each other...and I head to the living room.

"You are not deserting me!" B shouts.

I put my magazine on the coffee table and return.

B looks under the bed.

"Smells like it's coming from your side," he decides, like this could possibly be my fault. (Could it?)

We gather our composure, get the flashlights, and begin to pull the underbed boxes out, wondering if Gecko has finally done something cat-like and caught a mouse...which leads to other bad thoughts like, "We might have mice?"

Flashlights show nothing. We move the bed, first away from the wall, then to the right, then the left. Nothing. No squished rodents. No cat throw-up (another worry). Nothing.

"Could it be coming from...the basement?" we wonder.

Thoughts run through our minds...of a lone burglar caught in a broken basement window and trapped (we watch too much tv)...various intruders of the rodent variety that got in but not out...

We put on jackets and shoes and head down the back stairs. The windows look fine, the garage undisturbed. We enter the outer basement...seems okay. We enter the main part of the basement, still okay. We slowly open the door to the crawlspace basement, which is under our bedroom. And...nothing. Smells fine.

We go back upstairs, the smell is fading, almost undetectable now. We leave the bedskirt pulled up and the boxes out.

"If anything else unexplained happens, we call the police and go to a hotel, right?" I ask. I don't need to see blood running down the walls before I get the idea that the house wants us out.

--

It's been two days now and nothing. Current thought is that it's simply our new rug. We let it "breathe" on the front porch for a whole day before we installed it, but are guessing that the combination of plastic underbed boxes, new carpet, and bedskirt trapping it while we were away (and the thermostat was turned down, keeping air from circulating as much as usual) created such a foul smell. The carpet itself just smells plastic-y. Turns out it's olefin, which is polypropelyne, and made from petroleum. We couldn't have bought a less "green" rug, apparently. Unfortunately, we can't afford a wool rug that size, so we'll keep it unless it continues to present problems. I couldn't find anything that said olefin fumes were dangerous, but it can't be terribly healthy, either.

I'll take olefin fumes over something dead, any day, however.