Ordure
We've been living in our new house for around a month now, and I'm happy enough with it, but for one thing. The house has a distinctive odour, which is not overly unpleasant in itself, but is all pervasive.
Couple with this my very sensitive nose, which picks up smells at a lower threshold and seems to hold them for longer, and it's all starting to grate. My wife barely notices it, but I smell it on everything, and it seems to cling to skin and hair, clothing, curtains etc. I'm on the edge of turning to obsessive hand-washing and surface scrubbing. This is how it happens.
The identity of the smell is odd. It's somewhere between what might be rancid fat and - possibly - joss stick. I'm on shaky ground with both descriptions, as I can't really be sure of either. I'm not in the habit of keeping rancid fat around the place, but the fact is that the smell was coming strongly off the oven (blowing out when the fan was on) before I gave it a thorough clean. As for the joss stick, I base this assumption on the somewhat flaky nature of the previous occupant. Tarot cards, hippy paraphernalia, drapes over the bed... I'm assuming she smoked the odd herbal cigarette and burned the odd scented candle, too.
My personal opinion of joss sticks and scented candles is that they always, always smell like shit, and the people who pretend to enjoy them are in the deepest kind of denial.
So, just maybe, something she burned or smoked has been absorbed by every absorbent surface, whether it was the inside coating of the oven, the carpet, the drapes, the shower curtain. She left quite a bit of stuff behind, and it being mid-winter, we haven't quite got around to giving the place a thorough airing and redecoration. If she'd kept cats we'd have had the carpets she left up and out immediately, but she didn't, so we used a carpet cleaner on them and left them.
But I'm fast coming to the conclusion that this smell will not leave my nose till we rid the house of everything she left behind, slap on a new coat of paint, and leave a pot of Neutradol in every room for 90 days. It's affecting my sense of taste as well as smell, obviously, so it is increasingly annoying.
Couple with this my very sensitive nose, which picks up smells at a lower threshold and seems to hold them for longer, and it's all starting to grate. My wife barely notices it, but I smell it on everything, and it seems to cling to skin and hair, clothing, curtains etc. I'm on the edge of turning to obsessive hand-washing and surface scrubbing. This is how it happens.
The identity of the smell is odd. It's somewhere between what might be rancid fat and - possibly - joss stick. I'm on shaky ground with both descriptions, as I can't really be sure of either. I'm not in the habit of keeping rancid fat around the place, but the fact is that the smell was coming strongly off the oven (blowing out when the fan was on) before I gave it a thorough clean. As for the joss stick, I base this assumption on the somewhat flaky nature of the previous occupant. Tarot cards, hippy paraphernalia, drapes over the bed... I'm assuming she smoked the odd herbal cigarette and burned the odd scented candle, too.
My personal opinion of joss sticks and scented candles is that they always, always smell like shit, and the people who pretend to enjoy them are in the deepest kind of denial.
So, just maybe, something she burned or smoked has been absorbed by every absorbent surface, whether it was the inside coating of the oven, the carpet, the drapes, the shower curtain. She left quite a bit of stuff behind, and it being mid-winter, we haven't quite got around to giving the place a thorough airing and redecoration. If she'd kept cats we'd have had the carpets she left up and out immediately, but she didn't, so we used a carpet cleaner on them and left them.
But I'm fast coming to the conclusion that this smell will not leave my nose till we rid the house of everything she left behind, slap on a new coat of paint, and leave a pot of Neutradol in every room for 90 days. It's affecting my sense of taste as well as smell, obviously, so it is increasingly annoying.
posted by Anonymous at
Monday, December 20, 2004
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