The "Phew! It's The Dead Smell Again" Story

It was an ordinary day.  My wife had just walked out of our laundry room holding her nose and saying, "Phew!  It's the dead smell, again!!"  

The little decoration inside our rear door tells it all!

For years we have entertained a variety of critters that enjoy making visits to our rear deck to sample the edible fare that fills the ceramic dish on the deck.  Both Carol and I love animals and can't bear to see them starve to death.  Well, I'm afraid it has finally happened.  Sometime in the past week or so, one of the critters must have starved to death directly under the deck that runs the length of our "Beach House."  Might have been a raccoon, skunk, cat, but more than likely was an opossum that kicked the bucket.  Only half of our home has a basement, since the area where our house is located was at one time a quarry and made it impossible to blast and make a basement under the entire house.  The area that has no basement has crawl space under it with metal grates placed around the area for ventilation.  And ... that area is under our  family room, kitchen and laundry room.  Also attaches to the other part of our basement through a small door than can be opened to allow one to crawl in the crawl space.  Imagine that!  Anyway, have you ever smelled a dead animal?  We have!  And, it reeaaallllyyyyy smells!!  Really gross smell!  And, we have 11 guests coming for Easter Dinner.  

"Larry" is one of our visitors who
stops to eat on a daily basis.

For years we have had a air purifier in our basement to remove any odors from our kitty litter box which we keep in the basement.  Works great.  But the odor that comes from the dead animal, through the grates of the crawl space, through the miniature door and into our heating unit, that pushes the odor through the vent in the house, is horrendous.  What to do?  I unscrewed the small door to make sure nothing had dislodged a grate and entered our crawl space, but found nothing.  So, I placed the air purifier directly under the door, in the furnace room, and turned it on high.  Surprisingly, it has worked.  Kind of!  At times we get a whiff of dead animal smell, but it does go away.  We "Googled" dead animal smell to see how long we can expect the smell to last and it all depends on the outdoor temperature, weather, season of the year and the size of the animal.  Could take weeks!  We are hoping that the odor from the Easter ham, sweet potatoes, scalloped potatoes, pineapple stuffing, etc.  will overpower the dead animal smell and make for an enjoyable Easter dinner.  If not, we may have plenty of left-overs.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.