[stomachmonkey]

Last house I owned was originally a 1 story summer cottage.

It was knocked down to the foundation which was just crawlspace, a new foundation was built around the old one to increase the sq footage.

One winter we would get this occasional whiff of something foul.

Made us crazy. I'm giving the dog baths, turning over furniture looking for cat crap etc...

But since the smell would come and go it was hard to pin down the source.

Right around Easter my MIL comes over, she walks into the house and says "what's that smell? smells like something died"

I think Bingo!! Something got into the crawl space over the winter, died and on warm days we can smell it.

The only way to access the crawl space is thru a 2 foot wide access panel in my back office closet.

I clean out the closet, pop the panel and whoaboy, smell is definitely coming from down there.

I drop into the extended new crawlspace which is so low that you need to lay flat on your stomach and use your elbows to drag yourself around.

I check out every square inch of the new foundation and find nothing. So I make my way to the old foundation, the holes for the foundation vent windows stil exist and I'm just about to crawl thru when I hear "drip/splash".

Drip? What's dripping?

I shine my flashlight into the space and the first thing I see is the main sewage line that leaves the house cracked in half.

600 sq feet 3 inches deep of frozen raw sewage.

I scream SHIIITTT!

My wife yells back, "What is it?"

SHIIITTT!

"What?"

It's SHIIITT!!!

During the house reconstruction a lot of excess debris, lumber insulation, pvc, ended up being left in the space since it was really not usable.

Took 2 weeks and $10,000 to clean up.

The hazmat crew spent a week on their stomachs scooping debris into 5 gallon buckets and bringing it all out thru the only access, the 2 foot wide panel in the closet.

What a mess.