Funky smelling mystery

Ben was gone all week, trying to find and, er, exterminate Bambi up in Quebec so I was single parenting all week. Sam was being pretty good so it wasn’t all that difficult but on Wednesday when I got home I noticed a really funky nasty smell in the house. I walked around looking for a source of this nastiness without success. No leftover unseen doggie nastiness, no cat deposits of any sort, no drips or leaks, no sour milk-coated mop, nothing. So I did what I thought was best – I decided to ignore it.

Wednesday night I was having trouble sleeping because I’d watched too much house porn (HGTV shows) and was reviewing all the incomplete projects in our house and the potential for home improvements in my head. Of course one topic was discovering the source of the stench. I tossed and turned all night, finally getting up so I could at least jot down some of the things that needed to be done instead of trying to remember them in order to clear some synapses and thus encourage sleep.

While I never did sleep well, I was inspired to take the day off work, ship Sam off to daycare, and tackle one of the many projects on my list which was to make much better use of out kitchen storage capacity. Our kitchen has a sort of funky layout and we don’t have any upper cabinets, we have several small pantries, but we do have a fair amount of storage. Long story short (since this post really isn’t about the pantry), I spent the day shopping for storage stuff (miserable in and of itself but at least I didn’t feel as though I was ready to kill myself as I would had I had to take Sam with me) and then reorganizing all the pantry space in such a manner that I actually have access to the things I need!

When I returned from the store I walked in the house and assailed by the malicious stench once again. But this time it occurred to me that there was something slightly familiar to it and that was the smell of natural gas with added nasty odificant (I know it’s not a word but what do you call the stuff they add to gas to make it smell horrible?). But I wasn’t certain because it wasn’t the same as the stench I’m used to. I figured I’d look foolish but called the gas company anyway and they kindly sent someone right out. I bet they were here in 10 minutes.

The gas company guy walked in with his little sniffer instrument and started taking readings immediately with barely a glance in my direction. It made weird clicking sounds but I don’t know if the sounds were from taking the reading or the results but it turns out that my sniffer was working just fine and there WAS gas in the house. His little handheld electronic bloodhound nose led us to the basement where I forgot his warning “don’t turn on the lights!” Ooops.

There were two fittings that were leaking and had likely been leaking since they installed the new furnaces just over two years ago. The reason I noticed it now was that the gas company had just intensified the odificant this week so they were getting lots of calls like mine. Of course they couldn’t just tighten the fittings, he gave us some sort of citation because some of the lines weren’t properly attached to the basement ceiling so now we have to call the contractor to get that fixed because although it sounds like something we could easily do it requires opening and closing a fitting and frankly, I don’t want to mess with that.

It’s a good thing it was warm yesterday because I threw open all the windows for a mid-November in Vermont house airing.

Overall Thursday turned out fine. I now know that we don’t have any more gas leaks and that funky lingering scent from the basement that I couldn’t figure out is gone. I’ve also got fabulously rearranged cabinets and a freshly aired house. Why do freshly arranged cabinets give me so much joy?