The never-ending saga of the stench in the bathroom

Way back when we had a roof leak in the bathroom of the addition. Even before that time, we’ve had problems with mold growth in there and a continually funky smell. The smell continued. We called the builder a couple of times since then and he didn’t do anything so a couple of weeks ago, after much stewing and angst, I finally sent a letter summarizing the situation. We followed up with a call and this week, we met with the builder and some of his guys to see if we could get to the bottom of this mess. At this point they’ve tested and eliminated the sewer gas option and have moved on to a potentially leaky faucet (we see no evidence of a leak) in an attempt to rule out all the smaller potentially easy fixes before we move on to opening the wall in the main house that backs up to the shower stall. The goal is to avoid having to mess with the tile which would render it likely to leak which it apparently doesn’t do. Yet.

I can’t believe how much space in my brain this stench has occupied. There have been many nights when I puzzled over the origin of the smell, pictured the wood rotting away and the house collapsing, and stewed about the pace of getting it addressed. I’m still worried that when they open the wall (notice I didn’t say “if” because I’m relatively certain it’s just a matter of time) the whole house will begin to stink and we’ll have to move out until we can open the windows to air out the house, something we certainly can’t do right now because it’s 0 °F with the added bonus of feeling as though it’s –12 °F.

Every time I smell the mold/mildew smell in the bathroom it makes me regret that we put an addition on our house. Nothing like a bit of overreaction, eh? But I wanted the addition to be perfect and of course it’s not. What would I change if I were to do it today?

I'd make the windows smaller in the bathroom, laundry room, and the side of the bedroom where we have no view. This would make it more energy efficient and I've found the windows are a bit more trouble than they're worth.

• I'd have watched more closely what they were doing as they built although I'm not certain that it would have made a different. The builder nailed the wall of the new section to the SIDING rather than pulling the siding off before attaching the wall. He admitted that was a mistake when we talked to him on Wednesday. The point is that we should not have to know those things!
• I'd have put a bathroom in the exercise room area or at least off the mudroom. Three bathrooms sounds excessive but we don't have one downstairs.
  I'd have had them finish off the mud room (shelves/lockers) rather than pretending we'd actually get them done ourselves. I'd also have had them do the hall and stairs from the main house to the new section downstairs because right now it's open to the basement and it's just ugly.
• We should have immediately hired someone to build a patio around the back and do some basic landscaping. Our backyard is a disaster.
• Hired professionals to put in the flooring we've got in the exercise room - Ben did the work and hated it and it sort of shows.

I imagine that everyone who does any sort of addition or major renovation has regrets of some sort. If we'd have knocked down the existing garage and rebuilt it so it connected to the house we could have done something that was much more integrated but at the time, it seemed as though it would have been too expensive to do that. Now it seems as though it might have been a good idea.

The dirty little truth is that even before the addition we had plenty of space for three people and now it feels as though we were somewhat silly to do it in the first place. Then instead of worrying about our little mold problem, I could be occupying my brain by trying to design the perfect addition.