How do I fix my living room’s smell?

July 2, 2018 12:08 AM

My living room has had a certain smell since we first bought the house 1 year ago. I feel it’s getting worse (although it could be in my head). It doesn’t smell anywhere else in the house. How do I find out the source of the odor?

How do I figure out the source of the smell?

It had this odor when we first looked at the place 1 year ago, but I attributed it to musty staging rental furniture. After we moved in, I figured it was just stale air. Then maybe it was the paint? Then I thought, maybe it was a dead animal, and I just had to wait until it decomposed? Now I’ve come to accept that our living room just smells weird.

It smells... musty. Like... the armpit of an old shirt, or a dirty dog. It’s intermittent - sometimes it smells quite strong, while sometimes it isn’t discernible at all. (My spouse and I agree on this; it doesn’t appear to be related to growing acclimated to the smell, but seems to genuinely ebb and flow.) We’re in Southern California and it’s dry / no pipes in this part of the house... I don’t believe it’s mold, but I guess maybe? Because, what else could it be? It’s a 1905 house, so I guess anything is possible.

Things we’ve tried:
- steaming the rugs and carpet
- washing the curtains
- checking the attic (we had AC installed recently and when I asked the installers about it, they said they’d noticed the smell too ((embarrassing...))) but the odor source wasn’t in the attic)
- checking the crawlspace (the same AC installers checked on our behalf)

I found a thing of Killz in the basement; could this be Killz odor after 1 year? We’re pretty sure this place was a grow house before we moved in, but it’s not a marijuana smell.

The odor is only in our front room and does not permeate into any other rooms. But what the heck is this smell? How do I hire someone to help me address this?

posted by samthemander to Home & Garden (25 answers total)

1. Is there a cold air return register in the room? My living room smells like crawlspace sometimes when I'm not using the furnace because of a pressure differential.

2. Steaming is not a panacea. If you've ruled everything else out, you might consider tearing out the carpet.

3. Whatever it is could have even penetrated the subfloor. Yuck.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:32 AM on July 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

I had a weird living room smell in a rental and it was moisture-related, I think? These things are really hard to pin down! (Mine was in Seattle which is really damp, but I suppose even in Southern California if mold/mildew got in that on humid days it might bring the smell out.) One thing I did that seemed to address the smell was to get a dehumidifier. I borrowed it from a neighbor so I don't have a brand recommendation, but you may want to try that to see if it affects the smell at all. I also used DampRid bags in the closets and they worked very well.

Killz, as in the primer? If so, it wouldn't be causing the odor but might point to someone trying to cover up if the walls had mold. My smelly apartment got spots of mold on the walls during the winter, when the walls would be cold but I would be running the heater. I wonder if, being a possible grow house, similar heat inside + cold air outside may have caused issues.

Other than the dehumidifier, I used a lot of "natural" air fresheners, like making nice simmer pots full of citrus or herbs, and diffusing aromatherapy, because I wasn't planning on living in the apartment long-term and wasn't heavily invested. It helped a lot but didn't address the underlying problem.
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 12:37 AM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Tear out the carpet. After a certain point, no amount of cleaning will help if the source of the smell is in the pad below.
posted by quince at 12:44 AM on July 2, 2018 [19 favorites]

I had a persistent odd smell in a rental flat some years ago. It turned out to be moth larvae in the spare room’s carpet. Despite multiple treatments they kept coming back and we were told it was likely rotting floorboards combined with elderly pure wool carpets.

It was pretty awful. It was worse in warm weather. When we moved out, they tore out all the carpets and replaced the floorboards in that room.
posted by freya_lamb at 1:35 AM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You can hire air quality assessors for the home to get a definitive answer. I had a similar issue years back and it turned out to be the washing machine's drain pipe, of all things. We never would have guessed that. Since you mention Kilz and a carpet, I would put my money on that, but you can always just hire people to check.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 2:37 AM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Our living room smells musty sometimes, and I also associate it with humidity/ dampness. It is the only space in the house that is concrete slab on grade, and it does have a return air register to the basement. I second trying Damp Rid. The large canisters seem to work for our situation.
posted by Kriesa at 3:13 AM on July 2, 2018

I knew you had carpeting before you said so. Time to change it out. You really can't get carpet padding clean after a certain point. It holds a lot of nasty stuff that will definitely create odors.
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 5:32 AM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Nthing year out and replace the carpet, and the floorboards too if they stink.
posted by amro at 6:11 AM on July 2, 2018

Response by poster: Clarification:
- the floor is laminate. It is probably 4 years old. We steam-cleaned the area rug.
posted by samthemander at 6:45 AM on July 2, 2018

Best answer: Somebody covered up something and I agree you should hire specialists to determine the cause and have it remediated.
posted by jbenben at 6:58 AM on July 2, 2018

This is a bit off the wall, but more than once I have tracked a very bad, intermittent smell down to degrading plastic in a light fixture. You could check to see if the smell is worse when lights are on, and see if you can track the smell down from there.
posted by Squeak Attack at 7:56 AM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Hmm do you have any drains or pipes outside that the smell could be coming from? We had an issue with this that caused an awful smell. Even just the gutters outside can smell bad. I would also pull up the laminate (expensive, I know) but that to me is a likely source. A leaking radiator can cause a bad smell as well -- could bleed a radiator (if you have them) and smell the liquid.
posted by heavenknows at 7:59 AM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

On the drains-and-pipes theme, has the house been remodeled at all? Is it possible an old drain pipe wasn’t sealed off appropriately and you’re getting sewer gas wafting up?
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:44 AM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It smells... musty. Like... the armpit of an old shirt, or a dirty dog. It’s intermittent - sometimes it smells quite strong, while sometimes it isn’t discernible at all.

This was hit on a bit in earlier comments, but what is happening weather-wise when you notice it? Is it a dry day, or a damp one? Damp air will definitely make odors more noticeable.

Is the a/c on when it happens? Washing machine running? Toilet flushing/shower running? "Musty" is usually water-related, in my experience, so it's possibly a leak, or seeping dampness.

Is it stronger in one spot in the room? Near ceiling vents? Higher up or lower down?

Nthing getting an odors specialist to come out, and it probably won't be good news, but hopefully it won't be majorly costly.
posted by emjaybee at 10:24 AM on July 2, 2018

What's the heating/AC situation? If it's an old SoCal house, do you still have gravity heating? Does the heater live in the basement? I wonder if it's a situation where you're getting a musty basement smell from the gravity heater vents. It might be worth it to have the vents cleaned.
posted by Countess Sandwich at 12:18 PM on July 2, 2018

Meanwhile, cedar oil is a nice coverup for weird smells and, as a bonus, repels moths.
posted by theora55 at 12:33 PM on July 2, 2018

The first thing that comes to mind is: do you have air conditioning? I have a single-room window-vented A/C unit, and whenever the condenser drain gets clogged, the bedroom develops an odor that has colloquially become known as "Satan's nutsack". Since you don't have carpeting, and since the smell is intermittent, my first guess would be something to do with climate control.
posted by aecorwin at 3:10 PM on July 2, 2018

Best answer: "This is a bit off the wall, but more than once I have tracked a very bad, intermittent smell down to degrading plastic in a light fixture."

This. Check this and especially the outlets. We had a terrible smell that would come and go and didn't smell electrical. Turns out it was a late 40s era bakelite outlet that the prior owner had idiotically tapped to power the dishwasher and had literally crumbled in the wall from heat and ... well, it's inexplicable why a breaker didn't trip.

At first the smell was just a bit rotten but as it progressed the smell most closely resembled rotting fish.
posted by bz at 9:51 PM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

A possibility on the uncanny side: there are accounts of ghosts that manifest as transient smells, both pleasant and unpleasant. Can't hurt to suggest to the smelly thing that it "go towards the light," while also checking the physical causes above.
posted by Scram at 9:12 AM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Oh yes, coming back to add that it might be electrical. I had the fishy smell bz mentions (and before that I think it was kind of weirdly smelly in a way I assumed had to do with my moisture problem) and eventually did enough googling about the smell to make me sniff the breaker box. An electrician confirmed there were some bad...something in there. (Sorry, I don’t remember the exact problem but I do remember my landlady’s astonishment that I diagnosed an electrical problem by smell. If not for reading about it that particular smell would never have made me think that it was electrically related since it wasn’t a “hot” or burning smell.)
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 9:38 AM on July 3, 2018

Response by poster: Thank you to everyone for your answers! A few notes:
1) AC was only just added to our home by us in the last month; no previous temperature control system.
2) it is possible it’s something with the floorboards under the laminate. Oy vey!
3) I believe the odor eminates from the corner of the room, which is also the front corner of our house. It’s possible it’s something in the exterior/interior wall that’s moldy/off.
4) you all have given me courage to contact an environmental tester, and I’ve found two who I’m considering to have out. I’m admittedly feeling like a scared kid about it - what if they find something terrible? However that’s crazy - like, it’s only really a problem if I have a mold person tell me it’s a problem!? No, it’s already a problem, self.
5) electrical! Fascinating. This is... something I’m going to try to sniff out before calling the mold guy. This seems possible as out house is older and, although the electrical was redone about 8 years ago, you never know...
6) I do think our house was occupied by an old man who (probably due to hard times and lack of resources, so no hard feelings) let the house go to crap for about 20 years, before his daughter inherited it. So maybe it is a ghost! Hah.
posted by samthemander at 11:50 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Please update the thread when you figure out the source of the smell!
posted by amro at 12:45 PM on July 5, 2018

Response by poster: Update: the smell source has not been identified. I paid a handyman to come out and cut into the drywall where I felt there was most likely a potential issue, but on the day he came, the smell was gone and he looked at me like I was a crazy person. (God damn it.) He advised against cutting into the drywall since it would be another day’s Work to properly fix it, so I capitulated. He also advised just crawling under my house the next time I smell it, which is really unpleasant to do in 90-degree LA weather when it’s dark after work, so that hasn’t happened yet either. Since then, I’ve been hesitant to have anyone over to investigate, because the smell is unreliable and it means paying them + time off work (for example: it was strong when I came home at 8pm, and is now totally gone at 10:45pm... but sometimes it won’t be around when I come home, and then will creep up during the night. Gah!!) I have started a log to try to identify patterns but none have appeared yet.

One theory is that a cat is somehow using a corner of my crawl space as a mouse burial ground, and thus I’m smelling rotting mouse that quickly degrades and de-odorizes. As a deep skeptic, I’m annoyed to admit the the “its Ghosts!” theory seems to make just as much sense as anything else. I’m planning to do a deep clean and sage the house, if only because sage will cover the smell for a short while. I also read this piece in NYT which gives me no sense of control, but some hope that the smell will spontaneously disappear.

Shrug?
posted by samthemander at 10:49 PM on August 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Oh, I forgot to add:
1) it’s almost certainly not electrical; no electrical pattern seems to be associated with the smell. We will have days with powered devices + lights on and then no smell, and then sometimes come home after a long weekend where no one was home using power, and have a stink.
2) I don’t think it’s the floorboards, but it could be. This is something that I will likely investigate in september when I’m finally home for a weekend day - we will shimmy into the gross crawl space during a cool morning and see what we can see.
3) I didn’t call a mold guy because the handyman was like “If you have smelly mold, it doesn’t just stop smelling. It continues to smell.”
posted by samthemander at 10:59 PM on August 6, 2018

Mod note: Final update from the OP:

I asked this question in Feb 2019. In April 2019, I became pregnant and got distracted from resolving the issue but increasingly irritated by the smell. I began to believe it maybe actually was a ghost. In January 2020, I delivered our first kid.

In February 2020, while on maternity leave and in a pique of “WTF IS HAPPENING WITH THIS SMELL” I hired someone to rip up the living room floorboards. The waterproof vapor barrier had been installed incorrectly over the decrepit original hardwood floor, which had been soaked in pet urine in the corner from probably decades ago. This original hardwood/subfloor was the source of the odor. We replaced it with plywood and laid our laminate back down. The smell is gone.

I now assume the odor was intermittent due to air pressure/temperature changes between the interior of the house and the basement crawl space. The air pressure would force drafts upward between the cracks of the floor, and the improperly installed vapor barrier, into our living space. As the temperature changed, the air pressure would change and the air pressure would not cause a noticeable draft, causing the smell to disappear. Crazy making!

Two weeks after the fresh plywood was laid in and the laminate was reinstalled, the world shut down due to COVID and I spent 4 months trapped in my 1000sf house with a newborn. I am so, so, so-so-so glad that we figured out the source of the odor when we did!

posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 1:57 AM on November 3, 2023 [9 favorites]