We have a bad smell in the house.

Our house usually has a very nice smell. I’ve had several people remark that it still smells new, like a model home. When we come home from a trip there’s a nice, subtle smell of fresh wood and clean air.

Not that I can take credit for the good smell at all. It just means that a) I never cook anything exotic or with spices or that has what you might call “flavour,” and b) I pay people who are more conscientious than myself to clean my house. Oh, it also means c), a vinegar-water solution is really effective at removing pee from your couch. Two down, one more toilet trainee to go!

Anyway, for the past three or four days there’s been a bad smell. A really bad smell. It’s spreading, and I can’t find it, and it’s driving me crazy.

It’s not a pee or poo or barf smell — I am intimitely familiar with those. It’s more of a mouldy smell. The smell of something rotting. Like when you have a wet cloth you’ve been using in the kitchen, and it has a few crumbs of food on it, so you throw it in the laundry room, then it gets trapped under the shoe bench, where it rots away for ages.

Until you think to yourself, “What’s that smell?”

I thought I was really on to something with the kitchen cloth thing. The smell really does seem to be coming from the laundry room, and I have been known to toss a wet cloth in there and forget about it. But I’ve torn the place apart, and I can’t find anything suspicious. I’ve sniffed every shoe, every jacket, every old sports bag in there, and still I cannot find the smelly item.

Plus, sometimes I catch a waft when I’m in the office, or the family room, or the kitchen. So the exact location isn’t exactly, how shall we say…pinpointed.

I have a deep, deep fear that something has gotten caught inside the walls, or in a vent, some thing that used to be alive and now…is not.

Please God, may that not be it.

I’m going to have one more crack at taking apart the laundry room this evening. After that, we’re off to Southern Ontario for a week. If I don’t find the item that is causing the problem then…I may not be too happy upon my return.

Wish me luck.