What IS That Smell???

After several weeks of bitter cold weather and torrential rains here, I got the flu. And at about the time I came down with it, I thought I noticed an odd smell in one of the bedrooms. Coming from the linen closet. Did the cat hide a dead mouse in there, I wondered? But then the flu took over my respiratory faculties and I couldn't smell a thing.

When I recovered a few days later, the smell was impossible not to notice. I took everything out of the linen closet, found nothing. It was a very unpleasant, yet familiar smell. The linen closet shares a wall with the bathroom, but there was no smell in the bathroom, and no stains or moisture to be seen in the closet.

It was night when I noticed that when I closed the closet door, the smell built up inside. And when I opened the door again the smell was concentrated at the top of the closet. Hey, natural gas rises. Could it be a gas pipe leak?

At this point in my recovery from the flu, I felt okay. But my voice was 100% gone. I was loathe to call PG&E and try to whisper the situation to them over the phone. Was my house going to blow up the next time I flicked a light switch? Well, it hadn't blown up so far. So I went to bed.

In the morning, I had two vocal notes to work with, "do" and "re". So I called PG&E, and in a near-monotone, told them I smelled gas. They promised to send someone. I puttered around the house. The smell persisted. I left the bedroom windows open. I worked on my taxes. I made some dinner. I practiced the accordion. Finally, at 11:30 at night --- I had just started turning out lights to go to bed -- a  PG&E truck rolls up in front of the house.

Up the stairs comes a guy with a gas-detecting wand. He steps into the house, and not even looking at his device, he says, "That's not gas." He tromps from room to room, waving the wand around... Nope, no gas.

"So what is that smell?" I ask him. (By now my vocal chords have recovered another note -- I can go as high as "mi".) "Sewage." He says.

Oh, yuck. The next morning, I gird my will with coffee to go into the crawlspace under the house and take a look. I crawl. I find a furnace filter that needs replacing. I smell nothing. But the  house's bathroom plumbing is on the other side of the furnace, in the smallest part of the crawlspace. I just don't have the resolve to shimmy into it. So I call a plumber.

The plumber shows up, and he crawls under the bathroom. I hear him scuffling around down there, knocking into things.  He hollers up for me to flush the toilet a couple of times. He's down here for a good twenty minutes. Finally he comes back out and pronounces, "Your plumbing is in really good shape. Oughta last you another thirty years!"

No sewage leak? Nope. No smell down there? Not that he could find. No moisture even? Yes, lots of damp soil, probably percolating moisture from surrounding areas saturated by the rains. But no, no sewage.

"So what is that smell?" I ask him. "Something dead," he says. "Maybe a rat died in the wall, or in the attic."

I don't agree with him. A dead mammal smells like a package of meat left in a fridge after a three-day power outage. That's not what I smell in the linen closet.

Nevertheless, I tackle the attic next. This involves removing all the clothes from another closet, removing the closet rod, bringing in a ladder, and lifting up the ceiling hatch. I do all that. I stand head and shoulders into the attic. Smells lovely -- just redwood and dust, the way an old attic should smell. I can see the joists right over the linen closet and there is no dead rat among them.

By now my sense of smell is recovering, and I am beginning to recognize the odor in the closet. It's what the water in a vase of flowers smells like if you put off dumping the vase until long after the petals have dropped. Decaying vegetable matter, to be exact.

On the other side of the linen closet wall is the bathtub. There is still no noticeable smell in the bathroom. But still, could there be something unpleasant going on behind the tile around the bathtub?

Soap Dish: Portal to Another World

Channeling my inner Dr. Quincy, I remove the soap dish from the tile wall. I stick my nose into the dark space and inhale. Ah, yes... There is the smell!

I bravely stick my arm into the hole and feel around. I can feel the tub support rail, the wall joists, and the lath and plaster of the opposite wall. Nothing slimy and wet. No spongy, rotting spots in the wood. I can feel the side of the cast iron tub, but I can't quite reach down to the subfloor below it. Not that I'd want to. If something has died, that's probably where it's lying right now.

In a stroke of brilliance, I grab my camera, set the 10-second timer, wrap the loop around my wrist, and dangle it down into the dark space. I take a few pictures. I bring the camera back up and look. I can't really make out what is on the floor under the tub because the area seems to be littered with dead leaves.

Dead leaves? Decaying vegetable matter? Well, there you have it!

Here is my conjecture: An animal has built a nest of leaves in the space under the tub and above the subfloor. This could have happened recently, or years ago. More recently, the tile around the tub has finally lost its integrity and shower water is trickling down behind it. Right behind the wettest part of the shower is the linen closet wall. And at the foot of that wall, in a completely unreachable space under the tub, is a pile of composting leaves.

Middle Earth

On the plus side, now I have a really good excuse to remodel the bathroom.