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Originally Posted by john70t
Have had 'smells' in the house for a while and was a little befuddled for a while trying to find the source.
Sometimes it was upstairs sometimes behind the sink. Sometimes in the bathroom. Sometimes in the bedroom space upstairs.
Round and round. Frustrating.
Possibilities:
1). Dead mice. Confirmed.
Saw a field mouse running from a hole under the bird feeder towards the house. They are definitely in the garage. Bird feeder close to the house is the source. Had some hawks hanging out on the backyard fence but my presence scared them away unfortunately.
Last winter late at night there was a sudden freaking pile of maggots at the base of the stairs center of house spewing out of the carpet and crawling everywhere. Totally bizarre. The ceiling above that floor section slightly is closed off.
No previous evidence before.
I already filled in all the visible rim joist openings with foam in the partially-finished basement. Due to the joists they could only enter under the decks front and back.
Today I crawled under there and filled a few small gaps. That sucked. Everything else next to those sides of the foundation-house was under 1/4".
2). Kitty poop box. Confirmed.
I am pretty regular with his cleaning schedule these days and mist it with 10% bleach spray. Same with pet hair.
3). A beautiful hand-me-down oriental carpet. Confirmed.
The room stank of nasty chemicals and there is a HVAC return vent in there. Another previous dog with kidney failure (possibly from foreign food) had peed on everything. Other carpets had to be thrown away it was so bad. They bombed that thing.
I took the risk of using straight water with the Bissel upholstery attachment, which uses little water, and noticed possible improvement when furnace is on.
4). Radon gas. Unknown.
I replaced the vent fan and leave it on.
5). Water leaks from bathrooms upstairs. Confirmed.
The toilet definitely had a leak but is located behind cabinets and some type of false wall when they added the second floor. Difficult spot to see and work with. The ex gf had hung several heavy ceramic planters from the ceiling of the first floor bathroom which fell and chipped the metal tub. The reason they fell was bad attachment hardware with the drywall getting wet from the leak.
A plumber was already out to reset the base gasket. The toilet itself is an old design, doesn't flush well, and the non-common parts hard to find. There is carpet up there (yes yes I know) so the footprint of any new toilet won't match. I will need to pull the toilet, redo the flooring, and get a new toilet installed.
The upstairs shower also has a leak still to be fixed. I previous ran some silicone sealer around the edges of what looked like a sketchy surface mounting seal but that did not fix it. It's in the pipe. Probably not glued. I used a saturation surface tester and confirmed drywall around the drain increased after usage.
6). Methane. Unknown.
Both shower and toilet upstairs have not been used in a while. Because of that, the water in the p-traps will evaporate and then sewer gasses can back-flow into the house. I add water occasionally and taped off the drains.
Sometimes the smell is sudden especially when it's windy and raining. I installed 4" vent rain caps to keep out mice/squirrels and checked the down pipe in the attic was glued. There is no longer easy trees to roof access for them just in case they crawl down and die somewhere in the plumbing, blocking things up.
7). Roof leaks. Unknown.
I went up on the 12yo roof and it looks visibly good. There is zero no visible evidence of water tracking in the attic ceiling. A flashlight while raining will show this. Some window drip edge trim was cut slightly short, but it's under an overhang and protected from direct water.
8). Condensation. Suspected.
There is an angled enclosed wall/ceiling in the kitchen which melts a foot-wide snow on the back porch. That means a source of heat loss.
An infrared thermometer is useful for finding these temperature differences in the cold winter and hot summer.
Any enclosed space not exposed to interior 'conditioned air' will develop condensation like a cold pop can on a warm day. That constant dripping will create mold conditions when it puddles into the wall. That is also on the project list for this year.
I had the attic ceiling spray-foamed with "open cell" foam instead of the more toxic "closed cell". That might have been a mistake. The interior attic ridge venting is like a tornado sometimes and there is very good air movement up there. But "open cell" supposedly retains and exchanges some water content instead of being a hard shield. It's possible that the upper surface of the ceiling drywall might have created that condition.
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Wow! I will never gripe about my projects again…….
That was a fart-ton of work and investigation to boot. Good luck with all of that.
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